Only a flesh wound

An article from ABC News in Adelaide, South Australia, describes incidents where fencing wire was strung across a bike path.  According to police

The riders were travelling about 35 kilometres per hour and fell from their bikes. Two suffered minor injuries, while the third was not injured.

Police said each of their bicycles were severely damaged.

That sounds at first like extraordinary good luck: if you come off a bike at 35 km/h and your bike was wrecked, you’d expect to be damaged too.  I think the problem, as with a lot of discussions of road crashes, is the official assessment metrics for injuries.  In South Australia, according to this and similar documents:

Serious Injury – A person who sustains injuries and is admitted to hospital for a duration of at least 24 hours as a result of a road crash and who does not die as a result of those injuries within 30 days of the crash.

Minor Injury – A person who sustains injuries requiring medical treatment, either by a doctor or in a hospital, as a result of a road crash and who does not die as a result of those injuries with 30 days of the crash.

A broken bone leading to substantial disability might easily not be a Serious Injury, and several square inches of road rash may well not be even a Minor Injury. (New Zealand has the same definition of a “serious” injury is one that gets you admitted to hospital for an overnight stay, but doesn’t have restrictive standards for minor injury)

It’s not that these definitions are necessarily bad for collecting data — there’s a lot to be said for a definition that’s administratively checkable — but it does mean you might want to translate from officialese to ordinary language when reporting individual injuries or aggregated statistics to ordinary people.