The small numbers problem by Monty Downs – Special to The Garden Island I had a recent conversation with a professor/friend of mine about our Kaua‘i ocean safety effort and he mentioned that “you have the small numbers problem.” In
The small numbers problem
by Monty Downs – Special to The Garden Island
I had a recent conversation with a professor/friend of mine about our Kaua‘i ocean safety effort and he mentioned that “you have the small numbers problem.”
In my last column we looked at Kaua‘i’s drowning rate (nine drownings a year for a ratio of 14 for every 100,000) and projected it onto a densely populated area such as New York City. In New York, that rate would project to over 1,200 drownings per year, or three to four a day. This number would create a firestorm in the newspapers and there would be a whirlwind of activity, private and public, to knock down that number.
Another example: New York, using a number of strategies, has successfully and dramatically decreased its murder rate. There are now 400 murders a year in a population of 8.5 million, for a rate of 4.7 per 100,000. Meanwhile in Nashville there are 65 in a population of half a million. The rate is 13 per 100,000 — well over two times the rate in NYC. Because the New York papers report a murder every day and Nashville reports one a week or so, Nashville is perceived to be a much safer city.
Similarly with ocean safety on Kaua‘i: We often have months go by with no drownings to suffer, and it’s easy to be lulled into thinking that we don’t have much of a problem. This very understandable perception existed for many years. This has been where my emergency room perspective — where I get to witness and communicate the severity of the family trauma that’s inflicted by each and every drowning — has been helpful in the effort to increase our attention to this problem. And hopefully this attention will one day translate into a significantly reduced number and rate of drownings.
All this being said, it is now time to tip our hat to The Garden Island, which of course is our newspaper and has been running our bi-weekly ocean safety column for more than a year. This has helped significantly in keeping all players involved in thinking about and doing the things that could lower our rate, please God. It’s impossible to not end up repeating myself with points I make in this column — there are really only so many things that can be discussed about ocean safety on Kaua‘i. But simply keeping the topic in the public consciousness is in and of itself a big step toward making improvements. People from many sectors of Kaua‘i business talk to me and affirm that this column/conversation has been helpful to them.
I therefore take this moment to offer a special thanks to The Garden Island and to Publisher Mark Lewis, Editor Adam Harju, Advertising Director Kathryn Peterson, photographer Dennis Fujimoto and reporters Nathan Eagle, Rachel Gehrlein and Blake Jones.
In addition to running this column, The Garden Island links ocean safety’s Web site www.kauaiexplorer.com onto its Web site
www.kauaiworld.com
Plus they run a very prominent public service ocean safety ad in their sharp Essential Kauai magazine.
All this adds one more piece to the tough puzzle that we are trying to solve, adds one more chance to save a family from destruction. Even though we don’t know just who they are, some families have already been saved, I guarantee you that.
You at The Garden Island get a good share of the credit for these unknown saved families. That’s at least one happy and satisfying moment in this world that can offer up big number problems (e.g. Myanmar, Darfur) that are so very tough to process and address.
• Monty Downs is an emergency room doctor at Wilcox Memorial Hospital. His column appears every other Wednesday.
