Scary lack of context
A number that should be in all stories about accidents on special days of the year: 4500. That’s roughly how many new claims ACC gets per day: divide the 1.7 million per year by 365.
The Herald passes on the ACC’s figures of 31 Halloween-related injuries and 840 attributed to Guy Fawkes. First you have to divide by five, since these are aggregate totals over five years. Then divide by the average number of claims per day to find that Guy Fawkes Day is responsible for about 4% of a typical day’s injuries, and Halloween racks up about 0.1% of a day.
It wouldn’t be surprising if Halloween actually prevented more injuries than it causes — participating children will be doing something safe under adult supervision, rather than teasing innocent pets, fighting with siblings, getting underfoot in the kitchen, or participating in team sports.
Thomas Lumley (@tslumley) is Professor of Biostatistics at the University of Auckland. His research interests include semiparametric models, survey sampling, statistical computing, foundations of statistics, and whatever methodological problems his medical collaborators come up with. He also blogs at Biased and Inefficient See all posts by Thomas Lumley »