Statistics to Scare

So how do you parse the following paragraph from Monday's NYT Evening Breifing.

A study in JAMA Pediatrics this year found that the average Halloween resulted in four additional pedestrian deaths compared with other nights. For 4- to 8-year-olds, the rate was 10 times as high.

The paragraph  means the percent increase for pedestrian deaths for 4-8 year olds was ten time the percent increase for people as a whole, a number you cannot determine from the information given. Using the fact that roughly 7% of Americans are in the 4-8 year range, that yields a little under three additional deaths for 4-8 year olds and about one for the other age ranges.

The paper unfortunately sits behind a firewall. But I found a press release.

Children in the United States celebrate Halloween by going door-to-door collecting candy. New research suggests the popular October 31 holiday is associated with increased pedestrian traffic fatalities, especially among children. Researchers used data from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration to compare the number of pedestrian fatalities from 1975 to 2016 that happened on October 31 each year between 5 p.m. and 11:59 p.m. with those that happened during the same hours on a day one week earlier (on October 24) and a day one week later (on November 7). During the 42-year study period, 608 pedestrian fatalities happened on the 42 Halloween evenings, whereas 851 pedestrian fatalities happened on the 84 other evenings used for comparison. The relative risk (an expression of probability) of a pedestrian fatality was higher on Halloween than those other nights. Absolute mortality rates averaged 2.07 and 1.45 pedestrian fatalities per hour on Halloween nights and the other evenings, respectively, which is equivalent to the average Halloween resulting in four additional pedestrian deaths each year. The biggest risk was among children ages 4 to 8. Absolute risk of pedestrian fatality per 100 million Americans was small and declined from 4.9 to 2.5 between the first and final decades of the study interval. 

Doing the math, we see a 43% increase and a more than quintupling the number of pedestrian deaths for the youngsters. That sounds scary indeed. though it only adds up to a handful of deaths.  Moreover the authors didn't take into account the larger number of pedestrians on Halloween, particularly among 4-8 year olds.

A smaller fraction of people die as pedestrians on Halloween today then on a random day when I was a kid. I wonder if that's because there are fewer pedestrians today.

Also from the New York Times, a sociologist has found "no evidence that any child had been seriously injured, let alone killed, by strangers tampering with candy." I feel lied to as a kid.

So the upshot: Tell your kids to take the usual precautions but mostly let them dress up, have fun trick-or-treating and enjoy their candy.