No-one is arguing that the Qatari treatment of foreign workers is acceptable and we should certainly use the leverage created by the World Cup to get it improved. But the numbers in the Guardian report look very dubious on closer examination. Lets assume your number of 280,000 Nepali people is correct. The Nepali life expectancy at home is approx 70 years so if you randomly select a group of 280,000 about 4,000 will die per year or about 11 per day. About 20% of deaths are from heart disease so there will be 2 of these per day. Now the Nepalese in Qatar are likely to be younger and healthier than average so they might well have a much lower death rate than this. On the other hand they are working in high heat which might make the situation worse, even if they were being treated very well. But unless you know the expected rate of heart attacks among a comparable group of Nepalese it is impossible to deduce that they are dying because of the world cup. It is very dangerous to use statistics to deduce things unless you examine all the data. Here is an interesting one. WHL holds 36,000. If the. crowd was randomly selected from the British public about 450 of them would die each year. The ground holds about 30 matches a year each lasting around 2 hours. So that is 60 hours out of the approx 9,000 in the year. So about 3 people each year should die at the ground and by extension a few hundred at all sports grounds. By the Guardian's logic we would have to ban watching sport because it kills hundreds of people a year......
Interesting last para. We had a HT victim in the crowd a couple of weeks ago, think he was ok though, before that Muamba of course, he died but came back, does that count? I can't recall too many too many other serious incidents, from what makes the news its more like one a season taken seriously ill, not sure about death. ST holders maybe be able to verify that as some incidents may not make the news or forums.
one thing to consider is there will be medical teams already at venues such as football grounds. This will massively reduce the response time should something happen to someone. So that will reduce the number of people that die at the ground (or collapse at the ground and subsequently die) because they get treatment so quickly. If Muamba had collapsed on the street he was a goner. Admittedly he was extra specially lucky in that he had the medical staff of the team and the heart expert in the crowd.
Mmm, the middle east ambulance service, no idea what its like now but when i was in saudi i was sent to work in a fairly remote area, Jeddah was the nearest City of note 2 hrs away. Anyway, the only ambo's i saw there was those old american stretch saloon cars, bit like a white hearse! god knows what things like response time out there are like.
My analysis overestimates the numbers a lot - seriously ill people don't go to football matches for a start and there are medics in attendance as Spurm has pointed out. But the point is that there a lot of deaths that are nothing to do with environmental conditions. Trying to prove causality using statistics needs a lot of a care.
Unfortunately,on the 50+ years I have followed Spurs, it has never been for those of a nervous disposition..
I should think Qatar will have to think long and hard about whether to allow England to compete at their world cup what with all these heart attacks at English football grounds. Big moral dilemma for them ?
I was going to click the thanks thingy on your post, but the smiley that goes with it seems inappropriate in this case. Wot u lookin at 30-35 home games with good cup runs and 4 guaranteed EL group games, so on average one every 8 or 9 games. Thats a bit mad looking at it like that.
Looking at it statistically : WHL 40,000 * 40 (games) * 1.5 (hours) = 2.4m man hours /4 heart attacks = 1 per 600,000 man hours. QATAR 1.2m * 24 * 365 = 10,512,000,000 man hours / 500 deaths = 1 death per 21,024,000 man hours. (http://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2013/sep/26/qatar-world-cup-migrant-workers-dead) COMPARISON It is 35 times more likely that someone attending a football match at WHL will have a heart attack, than it is that a labourer in Qatar will die.
if you regard labouring in qatar as being 'modern day slavery', then yes - it does appear to be statistically much safer than watching football live in London.
Being forced to work in awful conditions for little or no pay and not being allowed to leave sounds a lot like slavery to me. One of the links that you provided actually uses the same phrase, ironically. The supposed lethality of the two situations that you've compared is irrelevant. I'm sure that more people get injured playing rugby every week than they do shoplifting, but that has no reflection of the morality of the two activities, does it?
which is the point that i have been making throughout this thread and which only one other poster up til now has accepted.
Your calculations are rather bizarre and I doubt stand much close scrutiny. Years ago I read in National Geographic that there was a significant correlation between the amount of a certain type of woodland in a country and the amount of alcoholism. They weren't suggesting any link, only showing what you could prove by statistics. This doesn't mean that statistics should be discounted, they are very useful if used properly, but to somehow conclude that it is more dangerous to go to WHL for a match than work on a Qatar building site is utterly mad. It's the sort of calculation that gives statistics a bad name, and gives people an excuse to discount them or use them for their own dodgy purposes (like the MMR scare etc).
why's that then ? because the newspapers have created the same inaccurate image in your mind of qatari building sites that they have in the minds of other posters on this thread ? is it also "mad" in your view to suggest that labourers in qatar are not flogged around the building sites until they drop ?
