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Comment by OscarCunningham | Hacker News Reader

> More than 6,500 migrant workers from India, Pakistan, Nepal, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka have died in Qatar since it won the right to host the World Cup 10 years ago, the Guardian can reveal.

I tried to work out the context for this figure, but the answer I found made no sense. It's frustrating that I'm having to figure this out myself rather than The Guardian being responsible.

From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Qatar there are approximately 2.3 million migrant workers in Qatar. For 6500 of them to die over 10 years is a death rate of 6500/(10*2300000) = 0.000283.

The typical such worker is perhaps an Indian immigrant in the 35-39 age bracket. According to https://apps.who.int/gho/data/view.main.60740?lang=en such people would have a death rate of 0.00319, if they remained in India.

So have I made a mistake, or is this article really about the fact that being a near-slave in Qatar cuts your risk of death by 91%?

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The same table says males in UK had a death rate of 0.00106 between 35 and 39 years of age in 2019 (5 times higher than workers in Qatar) so I don't know what's the mistake but it seems to me we can't compare those 2 numbers like that.

Of course not, these death rates are based on numbers reported by embassies. It’s unsurprising that they aren’t very accurate.

But if we were to believe these numbers, the only possible conclusions would reflect very well on Qatar.

Right, the numbers are so far in Qatar's favour that we know they must be wrong. Which makes it even more ridiculous that The Guardian has managed to fabricate a negative article from them.

I think you are making a mistake here comparing probability of death in a general population and a population of migrant workers. In general population there are people of different ages, including very old people, people with incurable illnesses, people with poor health. For comparison, migrants are generally more healthy because otherwise they wouldn't be able to do their job. For example, migrant workers are unlikely to die from being too old. Therefore, the probability of death from natural reasons for a migrant should be lower.

So we can assume that those 6500 people probably died because of other reasons, like traffic accidents, workplace accidents, bad living conditions, not getting medical treatment, and so on.

For the Indian death rate figure I used the one for male 35-39 year olds, because that's where Qatar's population pyramid peaks.

> So have I made a mistake, or is this article really about the fact that being a near-slave in Qatar cuts your risk of death by 91%?

No, you haven’t made a mistake.

The issue here is that the average HN user has absolutely no idea how rough conditions these migrant workers tend to come from.

It’s frankly quite shocking how many people here are okay with this. I think most HNers are quite sheltered and unaware exactly how tough life for many people in the world and cannot accept it.

That doesn’t mean one should take any lazy journalism seriously though.

> lazy journalism

Well the article does come from The Guardian, an outlet that has a long-standing nickname of The Grauniad because of its long-standing history of typographical and other errors.

> the average HN user has absolutely no idea how rough conditions these migrant workers tend to come from

But do we want to frame it that way? Does it matter where you come from or where you come to? We're talking about Qatar here and if the numbers are correct, they're doing a bad job at keeping those people alive. Saying "it's worse where they come from" is not actually a defense. You judge the situation, not the trend. You can be better and still be terrible at the same time.

> if the numbers are correct, they're doing a bad job at keeping those people alive.

That’s actually not at all what those numbers suggest.

The average HN reader isn’t at all like that, though some will love to advertise their high-school math skills to justify their lack of care with a high brow witticism.

If this is true it's a choice the Indian person has to make.

Doesn't change any potential mistreatment of workers in catar.

Catar needs to be measured by modern worker protection laws or standards.

> Catar needs to be measured by modern worker protection laws or standards.

But why? Western countries with modern worker protection laws would never grant visas to these people. Qatar lets them in by the millions.

How is this supposed to be a reasonable comparison?

We don't create those visas because we don't build tons of things and have our workforce.

How is this any reason to accept bad working conditions?

They are a rich and relativ modern country

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