It compares just 6pm-midnight on Halloween versus the corresponding time one week early and one week later. They estimate a 10x increase in deaths in age 4-8 children—see Figure 1. This doesn’t look like subgroup fishing since the 9-12 group is also quite large (6x increase). By your 5x correction factor, Halloween would still be more dangerous than other days for kids.
I still think it could be true that Halloween is less dangerous since this hasn’t measured pedestrian activity and trick-or-treat really might be a greater than 10x increase in 4-8 year olds out on the street. But this definitely makes it look less good to me than your presentation.
That analysis is using the same dataset I’m using, but restricting to 6pm-midnight. This has even more of the denominator problem I’m talking about: almost no kids are out walking 6pm-midnight on a typical day, since that’s dinner and bedtime. So 5x is likely much too small a factor to account for how many more kids are out.
Your graph shows an ~40% risk compared to the normal day in that age group. Using their risk ratio you would need about 25x times the child pedestrian activity to achieve that risk reduction. That could be the case, but I’m not certain. I’m not even that confident that you’d get the >10x needed to ensure a decrease in risk. Kids tend to go to hot spots for trick-or-treating, so the really busy streets that get >25x and spring to mind easily might be hiding the (relatively) depleted streets elsewhere that account for a larger fraction of typical walking. Hence I think your presentation is optimistic: it’s right to push back on the raw numbers but I don’t think it’s clear that Halloween is substantially safer than other nights per pedestrian-hour as you claim.
I also read the denominator problem differently. I took your argument to claim that 5x number to be a lower bound for the “trick-or-treating streets compared to the same streets on a typical night” and for that, it’s definitely true. But then you had to gloss over the fact that we’re comparing entire days (and non-trick-or-treating streets) and it’s much less clear that 5x is true for all-of-Halloween compared to all-of-another-day. Therefore, their analysis justified using your 5x number while I think your analysis was stretching the truth.
I would believe 25x, or even 50x for fall evenings, and I think 10x+ is overwhelmingly likely: it’s just very few children that are out during those hours normally.
I’m not approaching this by thinking about how many children you see on the street during Halloween, but about how what fraction of children are typically out in the evening and what fraction of children trick or treat.
While I appreciate the analysis, I also recently saw this article circulating: https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamapediatrics/article-abstract/2711459
It compares just 6pm-midnight on Halloween versus the corresponding time one week early and one week later. They estimate a 10x increase in deaths in age 4-8 children—see Figure 1. This doesn’t look like subgroup fishing since the 9-12 group is also quite large (6x increase). By your 5x correction factor, Halloween would still be more dangerous than other days for kids.
I still think it could be true that Halloween is less dangerous since this hasn’t measured pedestrian activity and trick-or-treat really might be a greater than 10x increase in 4-8 year olds out on the street. But this definitely makes it look less good to me than your presentation.
That analysis is using the same dataset I’m using, but restricting to 6pm-midnight. This has even more of the denominator problem I’m talking about: almost no kids are out walking 6pm-midnight on a typical day, since that’s dinner and bedtime. So 5x is likely much too small a factor to account for how many more kids are out.
Your graph shows an ~40% risk compared to the normal day in that age group. Using their risk ratio you would need about 25x times the child pedestrian activity to achieve that risk reduction. That could be the case, but I’m not certain. I’m not even that confident that you’d get the >10x needed to ensure a decrease in risk. Kids tend to go to hot spots for trick-or-treating, so the really busy streets that get >25x and spring to mind easily might be hiding the (relatively) depleted streets elsewhere that account for a larger fraction of typical walking. Hence I think your presentation is optimistic: it’s right to push back on the raw numbers but I don’t think it’s clear that Halloween is substantially safer than other nights per pedestrian-hour as you claim.
I also read the denominator problem differently. I took your argument to claim that 5x number to be a lower bound for the “trick-or-treating streets compared to the same streets on a typical night” and for that, it’s definitely true. But then you had to gloss over the fact that we’re comparing entire days (and non-trick-or-treating streets) and it’s much less clear that 5x is true for all-of-Halloween compared to all-of-another-day. Therefore, their analysis justified using your 5x number while I think your analysis was stretching the truth.
I would believe 25x, or even 50x for fall evenings, and I think 10x+ is overwhelmingly likely: it’s just very few children that are out during those hours normally.
I’m not approaching this by thinking about how many children you see on the street during Halloween, but about how what fraction of children are typically out in the evening and what fraction of children trick or treat.