Talking with a friend about burning man, they mention that someone has died there. This got me thinking, given 80k people in one place is essentially a small city. How many people die in a given city each day?
City scale data is not easy to find. But google tells me 7974 people die in .US each day. Wikipedia tells me that there are 331,449,281 people in the US. Giving the chance of death as 0.000024%.
1 death in 80k is 0.00001%.
Burning man is safer than the US in General...
@quixoticgeek most attendees are healthy and fit but they're also in an extreme environment consuming a lot of substances they might not be familiar with. I'd look at other concerts and festivals for a closer metric of safety, but it's not like anyone wants to add up the number of times venue security has sent someone off in an ambulance to an unknown fate so that number may not be forthcoming
Old people with chronic health problems are a much smaller demographic at Burning Man than in the total US population.
You are not comparing apples to apples.
@quixoticgeek selection bias? I don't know what the circumstances actually were but if it was an avoidable death then it probably shouldn't be dismissed.
@bracken we have no data at this point. All that is known is 80000 people, and 1 death.
I'm actually surprised it's so low
@quixoticgeek 80,000 mostly youngish people mostly without chronic illnesses and with disposable income.
@quixoticgeek most people dying in the USA overall are old, and dying of heart disease or cancer. I don't know anything about the Burning Man death, but it's hard to make such a comparison for a gazillion reasons, right?
@quixoticgeek the next part of the exercise is comparing the risks of BRC to the general population in terms of (a) demographic, and (b) activities.
A few decades ago I would have said it must be younger & healthier than the avg, but I don't know if that's still true.
@quixoticgeek Also while it's easy to compare Black Rock City to a sports stadium in terms of number of people together at once, people are actually living in BRC for a week.
And with that in mind, Black Rock City has an urban density of 42,600 people per square mile, higher than New York City as a whole, and approaching Manhattan itself.