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Drowning Deaths: Sex and Race/Ethnicity, U.S., 1999-2022 (provisional)

by meep

3 July 2023, 19:36

Before I give some demographic breakdowns on drowning deaths, tomorrow is Independence Day, and we get our usual safety warnings not to do something stupid and blow our heads off.

As a cause of death goes, ICD-10 code W39, “discharge of firework”, is very uncommon. I was able to find 158 such deaths from 1999-2020 in the U.S. — that’s total over the entire period.

So no, I can’t really do much in the way of more detailed breakdown, even by year, as once there are fewer than 10 deaths in a category, I don’t get the info. But there is one breakout I can do — by sex:

So 90.5% of fireworks deaths in the U.S. are of men. Keep that statistic in mind for comparison coming up.

Drowning Deaths By Gender

Here we go – I will show the numbers over time:

Notice that drowning deaths did bump up in 2020 for males – about 14%. They also went up for females, but not as much, percentage-wise, in 2020 – only 9%.

Interestingly, though, in 2021, male drowning deaths increased only 2%, while female drowning deaths climbed another 11%. Hmmm.

Well, let’s turn to the rates themselves, which will look very similar:

Pre-pandemic, male drowning death rates were somewhat volatile, but there was a general downward trend in the crude rate. That could be related to the aging of the population overall – older men don’t do risky things as often as younger men.

On the flip side, the crude rate for drowning deaths had slightly been increasing for females. It wasn’t a huge effect, but it’s there.

And now to compare against the fireworks deaths: only 75% of accidental drowning deaths are of males, as opposed to the 90.5% percentage of fireworks deaths we saw earlier. This is not nearly so lopsided in sex ratios.

Drowning deaths by race/ethnicity

This one may be a little surprising to some, but there are multiple aspects going on here, and I have some comments from my own college days and a swim test requirement we had.

To be clear here — I’ve simplified the racial/ethnic categorizations in order to be able to get sufficient numbers of drowning deaths per year to graph this.

Part of the problem is that racial groupings got re-defined in the databases for 2021 and after, so I had to aggregate a few groupings together to provide continuity. You can download my spreadsheet below to see what I did.

But, this does grab some of the large demographic classifications that are often used in comparisons of mortality gaps between racial and ethnic groups.

Reminder: High Drowning Rate in Alaska

First, the group with the highest drowning death rate: American Indian or Alaska Native.

In my prior post on the geography of drowning deaths, I noted the high drowning death rate in Alaska.

But wait, you say — what about the high drowning rate in Hawaii?

Well, it does depend on who is doing the drowning. If it’s people visiting Hawaii (aka tourists), as opposed to Pacific Islanders living there, then that isn’t going to make the statistics budge much, especially when combined with much more numerous Asians not living in Hawaii (and Pacific Islanders not living in Hawaii).

But I did mention that the databases changed the race/ethnicity breakout starting in 2021, and I actually have data back to 2018, and the NHOPI (Native Hawaiian and Other Pacific Islander) does have a high rate… based on a few dozen drownings each year and a small-ish base population.

There is a similar dynamic in Alaska.

But in the case of both Alaskan and Hawaiian natives, both spend a lot of time around and in open ocean water, which can be rather dangerous.

College Swim Tests

Before I discuss the rest of the statistics, an interlude to my college days.

I went to undergraduate study at North Carolina State University from 1992-1996, and at the time one of the many graduation requirements was passing a swim test. This is what was involved:

Swimming a few laps in the Olympic-sized pool
Treading water for some minutes
Doing a dead man’s float for a certain amount of time

I don’t remember the exact parameters, as NCSU has since dropped the test, and I didn’t have any trouble passing it as I knew how to swim. But plenty of people coming into NCSU didn’t know how to swim.

Which was just fine, as NCSU had two other things:

A 4-semester requirement of PE classes (1 of which had to be the PE 101 class during which we were administered the swim test, and had to pass other fitness tests, like running 3 miles in 30 minutes)
Plenty of swimming classes and open time at the indoor pool at the university gym

In trying to find the information on the NCSU swim test, I came across various articles like this one, where colleges were dropping swim tests because non-white students were going to need those swimming classes in order to pass them.

So, instead of taking the classes and learning an important life skill that might save their life later… the colleges get rid of the test, students don’t take the swimming classes, and have a higher rate of drowning deaths?

To be sure, one of the ways to lower one’s chances of drowning death is simply to stay away from the water. But it cuts out a lot of potential fun.

The swim tests were initially instituted back in the day when most of the universities were men-only, and it was seen that the men should be armed forces-ready. Many of the men grew up in areas where they didn’t have easy access to pools or swimming classes, and the swim tests were to force them to learn to swim while at college.

People have got to learn not to be embarrassed about not having a particular skill when they’re being given the chance to learn it — go learn that skill! Huzzah! I do it all the time.

It’s much better than pretending to have a skill you don’t have, especially when doing so could lead to your death.

Higher Death Rates?…Not Necessarily

So I tried to find the linkage between swimming knowledge and drowning rates, but the strength of the linkage obviously can’t be exact, especially when one thinks about it. The Native Hawaiians and Alaskans dying of drowning almost definitely know how to swim.

And that relatively low rate for Hispanics? Hmmm.

I came across a variety of reports, such as this one from Northwestern University:

Racial, ethnic disparities in swimming skills found across generations

Only 46% of Black and 47% of Latine children had swimming lessons, compared to 72% of white children
Less than 4% of white parents reported never learning to swim, compared to 26 percent of Black parents and over 32 percent of Latine parents
CDC reports Black children ages 10-14 years old drown in pools at rates over seven times higher than white children
Survey analyzed responses from 1,283 parents of 2,148 children aged four years and older

So yes, these all look correct… (and no, stop trying to make “Latine” happen… the reason it will not happen is that it looks too much like “Latrine”), but notice that there are no comments about Hispanic children drowning in pools.

When we look at Hispanic drowning rates over all ages, they’re lower than non-Hispanic whites – what’s going on there?

A combination of factors

The main thing with regard to accidental drowning, though, is that you can’t drown if you’re not in the water.

It can be that people who are skillful at swimming end up drowning because they are in dangerous situations (open ocean, riptides, surf, whitewater, impaired, etc.) and then you have people in safer water situations who are not skillful in swimming.

So the point is this: just looking at the drowning death rates is not going to give you an idea of which group, on average, actually has the best swimming skills.

Those with low drowning rates may simply not be getting into situations where they can drown, not taking the risk because they are poor swimmers. Those with high drowning rates may actually have excellent swimming skills, but are most likely to be putting themselves into the riskiest situations because that’s their job (as fishermen, say).

That may also be the case with the gender divide — some of those drowning deaths may be the result of men taking foolish risks, but some may be due to men doing their very risky jobs as fishermen or lifeguards.

But yes, sometimes it’s due to people literally getting in over their heads.