Originally Posted by GUWonder
You are correct, the US is far more dangerous if one goes by statistics.
Egypt gets about 8,000,000 tourists per year, right? Of those, the death rate from violence towards tourists is less than .01 per thousand visitors for each of the last 5 years for which there are complete numbers.
The US has a murder rate that is multiples greater: about .03-.04 per 1,000 people sometimes as high as .06 per 1,000 people, right? Now let's go to one of my favorite places in the world: Washington, D.C. It's a prime tourist destination in the US and often has a murder rate above .55 per 1,000 population. DC = much riskier.
The number of reported murders in all of Egypt in at least one year out of the last 4 was lower than number of reported murders in just Washington DC.
The greater risk in Egypt is the traffic, right? With some .12-.15 per 1,000 population dying as a result of accidents, right?
If I'm wrong, it should be easy to show the above to be substantially incorrect. If I'm right, watch for nitpicking.
The problem with using simple averages is that, statistically, it is simply invalid. Your numbers assume standard/normal distribution of events, which is incorrect. I really couldn't care less about whether anyone goes or doesn't go to Egypt or anywhere else but your analysis is incorrect. It also completely ignores the distribution of "events" in the US - for example as a tourist in the US you are almost (statistically) completely exempt from a number of categories in the murder column such as family on family cases or workplace murders, etc. I have no idea what % of murder cases they comprise, but it's not a variable that can be ignored. There are numerous other variables that need to be taken into account when doing this type of comparison.
If you consider this to be nitpicking, more power to you.