There are a lot of things out there that can kill you. Take it from someone who spends their life worrying about everything: life is scary and death is around every corner.
But, it’s not all doom and gloom, because many of the things that we worry about the most have high survival rates, much more so than you might think.
Plane Crash = 96%
As the stats shows, the majority of people involved in plane crashes will live to tell the tale. Of course, there are many different kinds of plane crash and this stat includes all of them. If you’re involved in a full on collision in the air or your plane crash lands into an icy ocean, your odds are a lot slimmer. But it is somewhat comforting to know that most plane crashes are not fatal and that the number of people who have died in plane crashes is actually relatively low when compared to auto accidents.
Bitten by a Spider – 99%
Researching into this one involved looking at a lot of scary spiders, so it became the shortest research project I have ever undertaken. Let’s just say that I saw somewhere that 99 out of 100 people survive spider bites, but if you’re anything like me then just the fright of seeing them might kill you first.
Alcohol Poisoning = 95%
The majority of people survive even after drinking a dangerous amount of alcohol. In fact, it is said that 95% of people can survive a dangerous level of alcohol poisoning. However, it is still incredibly dangerous and according to the World Health Organization, alcohol abuse and alcohol addiction is responsible for 5% of all deaths worldwide.
Heart Attacks – 60% and 75%
60% of women and 75% of men will survive a heart attack. The reason the odds are lower for women is because they are less inclined to believe they are heaving a heart attack. A man in his fifties and above who experiences chest pains will quickly seek help, sensing their immediate doom. Women, however, understand that the odds of having a heart attack are slimmer for them so they tend to brush it off as indigestion, panic attacks, etc,.
House Fire – 97.5%
I have a habit of turning all of the plugs off at night, leaving my partner very annoyed, especially when I go back for the second round of checks, just to make sure they didn’t sporadically burst back into life. This is a paranoia brought on by a belief that the house will suddenly combust from all all the tech, but it also renders a lot of that tech useless.
We have a couple of what you might call virtual assistants (as explained here, they are not quite the futuristic robot servants we all hoped they would be) and these spring into life at a single command. You can turn the lights on, play music, change the temperature of your home, etc, all from the comfort of your bed.
Or at least you could do, if your OCD partner hadn’t turned off all the plugs the night before. So, you see why my wife is so annoyed with this. However, in doing research for this article I discovered that, contrary to what I first thought, this new tech hasn’t led to an increased fire risk. Not only do many people survive fires in the home, but the risk of one occurring has gone down by nearly a quarter since 2006.
And that includes the period of time in which Samsung created a smartphone masquerading as an explosive device, so that’s saying something.
