But it's not 1.2 million is it? There are ~280k Nepalese in Qatar. The figures I saw were all Nepalese immigrants, meaning that there are probably a lot more deaths of other nationalities not in these reports.
Another piece in the guardian says up to 4000 workers could die constructing for the 2022 world cup. That is NOT a price people should be paying to hold a sporting tournament. FIFA have really ****ed up this time.
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......
god knows what things like response time out there are like.
just