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Comment by sphinxster | Hacker News Reader

There are 1+ million migrant workers in Qatar. Roughly, the average human mortality rate is about 1% per year. In a given population of 1 million, you could expect about 27 to die, on average each day. (0.01x1000000)/365 = 27

Sure, more elderly people make up the 1%, and if accounting for the workers ages maybe you'll have half that figure. Or a quarter. The point is, in context, one worker dying out of a million on any given day is unfortunately expected.

It doesn't mean it's not sad, or that the persons life was worthless, or that the death should not be investigated to determine the cause. It does mean that out of 1 million, thousands will ordinarily die during any given year.

How many times per day would it take for an authority to issue a statement like the above before such statements begin to seem trite and meaningless?

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> the average human mortality rate is about 1% per year

Are you talking about death from any reason? Because I don't think anyone expect the Qatar authorities to comment on someone dying from a water-skiing accident or from old age. Given migrant worker have to be healthy enough to travel and work, one would assume their mortality was significantly lower than average.

The question, of course, is work-accidents. Does migrant workers in Qatar have the same rate of work accidents as workers in other rich countries?

> How many times per day would it take for an authority to issue a statement like the above before such statements begin to seem trite and meaningless?

Nobody asks them to issue a statement every time a worker was killed. This was what he said when was asked specifically about the incident. Still think it's trite and meaningless?

You shouldn’t use the entire country, use the number of workers working on the World Cup.

Where is the line? One could equally then argue use the number working on only the one construction site. Eventually a point can be reached where 1 death may "seem" improbable. A wider view reveals a context people seem to have missed.

The line is whatever level is being overseen by the official. If someone gets burned at a Dunkin’ Donuts, first would be the manager of that Dunkin’, then the regional manager, and then eventually the CMO. Maybe the CMO deals with reports of burns in a spreadsheet, because they see so many. For this case, you’ve misaligned a World Cup employee with the purview of the leader of the country. The number of migrant worker deaths in Qatar is not their concern, but the number of deaths of migrants working on the World Cup is.

I guess ChatGPT wasn't out at the time.

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