Where Do Most People Die? | Unveiled
In this video, Unveiled asks the extraordinary question; Where do most people die?
Where Do Most People Die?
It’s often said that one of the only sureties we have in life is that, one day, our life will end. But whenever we contemplate our own demise, the focus is more often on the “how?” or the “when?” rather than looking at another important factor: “where?”
This is Unveiled, and today we’re answering the extraordinary question; where do most people die?
Since a person’s cause of death more often than not determines their place of death as well, for today’s question it’s important to look at what the most common ways to die are. The absolute most common cause of death, by a distance, is cardiovascular diseases - a somewhat broad term which includes heart attacks and strokes. Cardiovascular diseases and then cancers make up almost half of all deaths around the world, while respiratory diseases ranging from the common cold to the flu to pneumonia are the third leading cause of death. Notably, these are all things that generally require medical treatment, meaning a large proportion of those afflicted will find themselves in the hospital – potentially without ever leaving it again. So, it’s a predictable but no less pertinent truth that many people do and will die in hospitals.
Interestingly, some of the more headline-grabbing causes of death – like war casualties and natural disaster fatalities – make up less than 0.5% of the world’s total deaths combined, despite being the ones we perhaps hear most about. Meanwhile, other contagious diseases we think of as being incredibly dangerous, like malaria, HIV/AIDS and tuberculosis, also kill significantly fewer people than those three leading causes of death - cardiovascular diseases, cancers and respiratory illnesses. One other sombre reality is that, in a statistical sense, you’re more likely to die in a road accident than you are to drown, get murdered, or die from substance abuse. Which is in no way to underplay the tragedy and significance of any of these fates, only to consider them as singular parts of our all-encompassing question; how and where do people die?
It’s also crucial to note that statistics can vary wildly depending on where geographically you are in the world, and the most common cause of death can change from one country, continent or region to another. For example, HIV/AIDS might be responsible for a relatively low death toll globally… but it’s the number one cause of death in Botswana, for instance. In many countries, including Denmark, Japan and Taiwan, you’re actually more likely to die of cancer than of cardiovascular disease. One factor as to “Why?” might be that the World Health Organisation estimates that up to eighty percent of cardiovascular diseases are preventable - meaning that certain countries or societies are perhaps, for a variety of reasons, better equipped against them.
What’s perhaps more surprising, though, is that in many countries, the hospital isn’t the location your most likely to die at. In recent years in the United States, the home has overtaken it as the most common place of death, although it is still a very close split between the two. A multi-authored 1979 study based on New York State clearly showed then that the vast majority of deaths happened inside institutions – which included not only hospitals but also nursing homes and specialist hospitals, like those built for TB patients. More recent studies, though, say that now more than half of Americans die at home.
One reason for the decrease in hospital deaths could be simply that medicine is improving and we’re better able to treat people now; the stats show that fewer and fewer people die in the emergency room, for example. But there might be other factors at play, as well. In the US specifically, more than ten percent of the population reportedly lives below the poverty line, meaning they might be unable to pay for the healthcare they need. A 2017 Bankrate Money Pulse survey found that a quarter of Americans have had to refuse medical care at one time or another because they couldn’t afford it, even with insurance. Consider similar problems playing out all over the globe, when health becomes a financial issue, and it could be that hospital deaths are decreasing because some cases never get to one.
However, there are other, less bleak reasons why the number of home deaths in the US is increasing. In the last few decades, the focus for healthcare has at times been less on prolonging life at all costs, often prioritizing someone’s quality of life instead. Patients may even choose to forgo intensive and risky medical procedures so that they can spend the rest of their time in comfort at home - even if that means getting less time overall. After all, there are plenty of people who simply don’t want to die in hospitals. Yes, you have medical treatment close at hand, but they’re also unfamiliar and often unsettling environments.
While most people do die in a hospital or at home, though, that’s still not everybody. There is a percentage of the global population who die elsewhere. It’s thought a large portion of these other deaths could well come from the homeless community, with homelessness increasing across the world and (according to studies, including a 2017 report by Yale University), especially in richer countries and cities. In England, for example, as many as one person in every two hundred is homeless, according to a 2016 study by the charity Shelter. Meanwhile, homeless people have also been found to have shorter life expectancies, with a higher chance of dying young, on the streets, from what could’ve been treatable causes. It’s an ongoing political, economic and health issue around the world.
Naturally, though, there are other ways of dying outside, or of not dying at home or in a hospital. Road traffic accidents account for most of these, with other, rarer accident types adding to the toll. But, incredibly enough, there are some places allegedly untouched by death. There’s a popular urban legend, for example, that it’s illegal to die on Disney property – that if someone does, they’re removed from whatever Disney park they were in, before being declared dead elsewhere, so that Disney can legally say that nobody has ever died there. Popular as this legend is though, it’s not true… and Disneyland has, unfortunately, seen patrons pass away. There have even been some notably unusual deaths at Disney, including a fatal plane crash in a parking lot at EPCOT. Similarly, there’s a well-pedalled belief that it’s illegal to die in the Houses of Parliament in the UK… but that’s also a myth, with there being various examples throughout history of people who have passed away there without any legal difficulty. So, is there any truth at all to the idea that it is or could ever have been against the law to die in certain places?
Well, to a certain extent, there actually is. In Ancient Greece, it really was made illegal for people to die on the island of Delos because that island was considered sacred. It needed to be kept “pure”, so on the orders of the Oracle of Delphi, dying was outlawed as well as giving birth. Death has even been forbidden at certain places as recently as in the twenty-first century. There are small towns in Brazil and France where you’re reportedly not allowed to die because the local cemeteries are all full, unable to hold any more bodies before becoming a health hazard in themselves! If you do happen to die in either town, your family could inherit a fine; a so-called “death tax”. It’s a similar case for a small town in Norway… It’s not technically “against the law” to die in Longyearbyen, but anybody presumed to be close to death is swiftly flown to the capital city, Oslo, to die there instead. This is because bodies from the Spanish Flu pandemic have still not decomposed in the town’s cemetery due to the extremely cold temperatures in the Arctic Circle. It’s feared that were they to be disturbed during a present-day funeral, then the preserved virus could return, more than one hundred years after the infamous outbreak.
Even so, it’s still highly unlikely that there’s any location in the world completely free from death. It’s estimated that over one hundred billion people have lived and died on Earth to this point. To turn that sobering statistic into a geographical matter, it’s an average of 1,750 people per square mile of land on the planet; 500 people per square mile of surface area total… meaning someone has probably died just about everywhere. Even the most remote, uninhabitable part of the world, Antarctica, has seen more than its fair share of deaths due to misguided, unsuccessful expeditions and disasters… such as what happened to the Spanish warship San Telmo. It wrecked in the Southern Ocean’s Drake Passage in 1819, leading to the deaths of more than six hundred people. The San Telmo crew could well have been the first people to ever set eyes on the icy continent and, as a result, may also have been the first to die there.
Despite death being a strange, mysterious, and often frightening thing, it is something that’s eeireily quantifiable. For most people, what’s most likely to happen is that they pass away in the comfort of home, or in a hospital bed - with various ways of getting to that inevitable point. But, truly, death can happen anywhere. All that’s left to do until then, is to make the most of the life that comes before it. And that’s where most people die.
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