Reading the numbers
Four pieces on what mortality statistics actually say, and the specific ways they get misread.
The dashboard is a visualisation. These are the explanations behind it — written for anyone who has looked at a global death statistic and wondered where on earth it came from.
Why 1.95 deaths per second?
Deriving the global death rate from scratch — and why the "right" answer moved by twenty
per cent between 2019 and 2021.
What actually kills people
Cardiovascular disease leads the global mortality table, and has for decades. The far more interesting
question is what has been climbing the table underneath it.
How rare is a rare death?
Sharks, coconuts, vending machines and spontaneous combustion — sorting the documented
from the merely repeated, and why we are so bad at this.
Why Germany looks deadlier than Kenya
Germany's crude death rate is more than double Kenya's. Germans are not in more danger.
The single most misread statistic in demography.
If you want the arithmetic behind the counters rather than the context around them, the methodology page has every figure the site uses and how each is calculated.