JimLap:
A slight upgrade on PADI Sport Diver? What is the point apart from marketing - I mean those divers who only dive on vacation will always be under professional supervision anyway so dont need the 'unsupervised' part of OW.
Scuba Deaths
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A slight upgrade on PADI Sport Diver? What is the point apart from marketing - I mean those divers who only dive on vacation will always be under professional supervision anyway so dont need the 'unsupervised' part of OW.
diebeste
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jaybombs25:
Bowling. PADI says so, so it must be true.:huh:
jaybombs25:
My definition of sport would include persperation and no pain no gain. Those who shore or technical dive have some logistical challenges but once we are in the water the vast majority of recreational diving does not include much in the way of physical activity. Diving is a recreation not a sport.
ArcticDiver:
A very high percentage of recreational diving is not physically demanding activity, but because of the heavy resistance of water, diving can quickly become a physically demanding activity. It's stupid to risk physically demanding activity if you are unhealthily out of shape, so I would say stupidity is far and away the biggest killer in the leisure activity of diving.
For there to be a "death-rate" the total number of dives during the period of recorded deaths must be known.
I´d say that both the number of deaths and the total number of dives are unknown. So if you claim that .0029% of dives end up with a fatality how can you (or DAN) support that number with facts? Did you report your dives to DAN last year? did anyone you know? .0029% may be a good "guesstimate" or it may not be, there´s no way to know...
Diving is dangerous and potentially fatal. It is a proposition those that dive need to accept and make their peace with (or ignore if that´s what you want to do). As long as you take whatever precautions you deem necessary in your diving, why should you care if a bunch of other people die? Unless you dive the way they do, their deaths do not indicate the risk of your diving...
ymmv
I´d say that both the number of deaths and the total number of dives are unknown. So if you claim that .0029% of dives end up with a fatality how can you (or DAN) support that number with facts? Did you report your dives to DAN last year? did anyone you know? .0029% may be a good "guesstimate" or it may not be, there´s no way to know...
Diving is dangerous and potentially fatal. It is a proposition those that dive need to accept and make their peace with (or ignore if that´s what you want to do). As long as you take whatever precautions you deem necessary in your diving, why should you care if a bunch of other people die? Unless you dive the way they do, their deaths do not indicate the risk of your diving...
ymmv
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We’ve been through this a bunch of times. Here we go again.
Chest pain on the golf course may result in death but more likely will result in an ambulance ride to the ER. The same situation 100 feet down is much more likely to result in death. So is it the underlying heart condition or the dive?
We have incomplete numerators for diving fatalities and denominators that are pulled out of thin air. So what can you do? One approach is to take a sport that you have (or can infer) a reasonable numerator and denominator, normalize that to diving numerator and see what the resultant diving denominator tells us.
Let's go back to football for a minute: There were three fatalities directly related to football during the 2005 football season. Two were associated with high school football and one with professional football. In 2005 there were 12 indirect fatalities. Eight were associated with high school football, two with college football, one youth league, and one professional football. For the approximately 1,800,000 football participants in 2005, the rate of direct fatalities was 0.17 per 100,000 participants. To reach that level of risk there would have to be more than 52 million active divers in the U.S. Are there 52 million active divers? No! More like 2.5 to 5 million. So you can see that diving has, more or less, an order of magnitude more risk of death associated with it on a per participant basis.
Consider the numbers a bit. There are 22 player hours per game with about 100 player hours at the field, so each player averages .25 hours per game (more or less) and about 15 practice hours per week. So let’s round down to make football appear more dangerous and say that each player is exposed to the risks of football for about 10 hours per week and 100 hours per season. So for 180 million risk exposure hours there were three fatalities. Carrying this over to diving (with say 80 fatalities that year), to have the same level of risk there would have to have been about five billion diver hours spent underwater (or more than 10 hours underwater for every person in the United States), not likely. Even if we include the indirect fatalities, there would have to be 500 million diver hours or two hours underwater for every man woman and child in the United States, again … not very likely. So I think we can safety conclude that diving is more dangerous than playing football. Exactly how much more dangerous is anyone’s guess.
Chest pain on the golf course may result in death but more likely will result in an ambulance ride to the ER. The same situation 100 feet down is much more likely to result in death. So is it the underlying heart condition or the dive?
We have incomplete numerators for diving fatalities and denominators that are pulled out of thin air. So what can you do? One approach is to take a sport that you have (or can infer) a reasonable numerator and denominator, normalize that to diving numerator and see what the resultant diving denominator tells us.
Let's go back to football for a minute: There were three fatalities directly related to football during the 2005 football season. Two were associated with high school football and one with professional football. In 2005 there were 12 indirect fatalities. Eight were associated with high school football, two with college football, one youth league, and one professional football. For the approximately 1,800,000 football participants in 2005, the rate of direct fatalities was 0.17 per 100,000 participants. To reach that level of risk there would have to be more than 52 million active divers in the U.S. Are there 52 million active divers? No! More like 2.5 to 5 million. So you can see that diving has, more or less, an order of magnitude more risk of death associated with it on a per participant basis.
Consider the numbers a bit. There are 22 player hours per game with about 100 player hours at the field, so each player averages .25 hours per game (more or less) and about 15 practice hours per week. So let’s round down to make football appear more dangerous and say that each player is exposed to the risks of football for about 10 hours per week and 100 hours per season. So for 180 million risk exposure hours there were three fatalities. Carrying this over to diving (with say 80 fatalities that year), to have the same level of risk there would have to have been about five billion diver hours spent underwater (or more than 10 hours underwater for every person in the United States), not likely. Even if we include the indirect fatalities, there would have to be 500 million diver hours or two hours underwater for every man woman and child in the United States, again … not very likely. So I think we can safety conclude that diving is more dangerous than playing football. Exactly how much more dangerous is anyone’s guess.
People, just accept the fact that "there are no reliable numbers on diving accident/death rates." It's very likely there never will be.
grazie42:
actually i think the figure you are referring to represents the chance of dieing from a diving accident given that you have had an accident (diving deaths per diving accidents if you will both of these figures are known)
DAN only reports data on incidents that are reported to DAN; therefore they are not a COMPLETE picture of the accident "rate" - however; their data is probably the most complete data available, and it would be safe to assume that the rate calculated is fairly accurate.grazie42:
DAN:
OutdoorStud:
Not even that is known. DAN only knows what is reported to them and no one is obligated to report to them.
What can be done, though, is to compare the injury or fatality count that we do have for diving against other activities for which we do know the total exposure. Then work backwards to find out what diving exposure would be required to normalize the counts.
Thal did this in a post a while back comparing football fatalities/exposere to diving fatalities. Lots more people die diving and for the rate to be comparable the diving exposure would have to be astronomical. So while we don't know exactly how bad it really is, it sure looks to have a MUCH higher fatality rate than football.
The industry is fond of comparing the relative safety of diving to things like the injury rate of bowling and they claim them to be about the same. The problem is that a bowling injury is usually something like a broken fingernail and divers that get hurt end up in chambers, living in weel chairs or dead. I've never heard of a bowling fatality even with all the bowlers who bowl while intoxicated.
Diving is dangerous...though more dangerous for some than for others...and anyone who says it isn't is either misinformed or a liar.
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