The Actual Risk Dashboard — Everyday Risk in Micromorts
A micromort is a one-in-a-million chance of death. This page converts the risks people argue about into one unit, then checks them against what actually kills Americans by age.
Signature chart
Log-scale micromorts per exposure
Axis is logarithmic from 0.1 to 10,000 micromorts. A bar twice as wide is not twice the danger; it is much more.
Quick reference
Everyday activities ranked in micromorts
Use this table to compare orders of magnitude. Travel risks are usually per distance; adventure risks are usually per event. Mixing those frames is how headlines mislead.
| Unit | Source year | Gotcha / when not to use | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Commercial flight | 0.1 | per 1,000 passenger miles | IATA/NTSB, 2024; order of magnitude | Airport driving usually dominates the trip risk for short flights. |
| Lightning strike in the US | 0.06 | per person-year | NOAA 2014-2023 average | Annual averages hide weather exposure; leave ridgelines, fields, and water during storms. |
| Living, all US ages | ~25 | per day | NCHS/CDC 2024 crude mortality | Age dominates baseline: a healthy 25-year-old and an 85-year-old are not near this average. |
| Driving / riding in a motor vehicle | ~12 | per 1,000 vehicle miles | NHTSA 2024 fatality rate, 1.20 deaths / 100M VMT | Risk rises with speed, impairment, night driving, small vehicles, and rural roads. |
| Motorcycling | ~250 | per 1,000 motorcycle miles | NHTSA/NSC recent US rates | This is the standout everyday voluntary risk; helmet use changes injury severity, not the exposure base. |
| Walking near traffic | ~40 | per 1,000 miles walked | US pedestrian deaths and exposure estimates, 2020s | Useful for city design, not for a park walk; night arterial roads are a different risk class. |
| Cycling near traffic | ~30 | per 1,000 miles cycled | US cyclist deaths and exposure estimates, 2020s | Protected lanes and route choice move the number more than helmet debates do. |
| General aviation | ~80 | per 1,000 flight miles | NTSB general aviation accident data, recent decade | Private/piston operations are not comparable to scheduled airlines. |
| Skydiving | 4.6 | per jump | USPA 2025: 16 deaths / 3.47M jumps | Tandem, student, wingsuit, and canopy-piloting risks differ; this is the aggregate USPA rate. |
| Scuba diving | ~5 | per dive | DAN/Spiegelhalter historical estimates | Training, depth, solo diving, overhead environments, and cardiac risk change the denominator. |
| Base jumping | ~430 | per jump | BASE fatality studies, historical estimates | Small sample, strong selection effects, and site difficulty make precise averages fragile. |
| Marathon running | ~7 | per race | Spiegelhalter/large marathon registries | Deaths are rare, usually cardiac; training status matters more than the event label. |
| Downhill skiing / snowboarding | ~0.7 | per day | NSAA/Spiegelhalter historical estimates | Collision, tree wells, avalanche terrain, and speed shift risk more than resort averages show. |
| Horse riding | ~0.5 | per ride | Nutt “Equasy” comparison, 2009 | The point is comparison: familiar risks can exceed stigmatized ones. |
| MDMA/ecstasy | ~0.5 | per use episode | Nutt drug-harm comparison, 2009 | Purity, dose, overheating, mixing drugs, and medical vulnerability make the average unreliable for an individual. |
| US childbirth, maternal death | 18.6 | per live birth | CDC/NCHS 2023 maternal mortality rate | Age, race, chronic disease, access to care, and definition windows matter; this is population-level decision support. |
| General anesthesia | ~10 | per anesthetic | Modern anesthesia safety literature, order of magnitude | Surgical risk is often much larger than anesthesia-only risk; emergency and frail-patient cases are different. |
| Ladder work at home | ~2 | per serious ladder session | NSC/CDC fall injury data, rough conversion | For older adults, roof and ladder falls are not “minor household chores.” |
| Bathing / bathtub drowning | ~0.4 | per year for average adult | CDC WONDER/NSC drowning data, recent years | Risk concentrates in toddlers, older adults, intoxication, and seizure/syncope history. |
| Heat exposure | ~5 | per hot-season year for high-risk people | CDC heat mortality, 2020s | Average annual risk is small; heat waves make risk local, acute, and unequal. |
| Fire / smoke at home | ~9 | per US person-year | NSC Injury Facts, recent years | Working smoke alarms and not smoking indoors are the large levers. |
| Firearm homicide exposure | ~55 | per US person-year | CDC 2024 homicide/firearm mortality context | Not evenly distributed: geography, relationships, age, and violence exposure dominate. |
| Drug poisoning / overdose exposure | ~270 | per US person-year in peak-risk adult groups | CDC 2024 preventable injury pattern | A population average is misleading; opioid/stimulant exposure is the risk switch. |
| Backcountry hiking | ~1 | per long day | Search-and-rescue / park-service order of magnitude | Weather, terrain, water crossings, solo travel, and navigation errors drive most risk. |
| Seasonal influenza infection | ~100 | per infection for older/high-risk adult | CDC flu burden ranges, recent seasons | Age and comorbidity matter; this is not a healthy-child estimate. |
| COVID-19 infection | variable | per infection, age/vaccine dependent | CDC surveillance, current-era framing | Do not use a single number across ages; vaccination, prior infection, and variant period dominate. |
Values are rounded to comparison precision. “~” means the source supports the order of magnitude better than a stable universal rate.
Base rates
What actually kills people, by age bracket
CDC/NSC 2024 leading-cause rankings show the lifecycle pattern: congenital causes and injury early, suicide/homicide/overdose in youth and midlife, then cancer, heart disease, stroke, Alzheimer’s, and respiratory disease later.
| Cause | 0-1 | 1-4 | 5-9 | 10-14 | 15-24 | 25-34 | 35-44 | 45-54 | 55-64 | 65-74 | 75-84 | 85+ |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Preventable injury | 4 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 3 | 3 | — | — | — |
| Congenital anomalies | 1 | 2 | 3 | 5 | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — |
| Short gestation / low birth weight | 2 | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — |
| SIDS | 3 | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — |
| Maternal pregnancy complications | 5 | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — |
| Cancer | — | 3 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 4 | 3 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 2 |
| Homicide | — | 4 | 4 | 4 | 3 | 3 | — | — | — | — | — | — |
| Heart disease | — | 5 | — | — | 5 | 5 | 2 | 2 | 2 | 2 | 2 | 1 |
| Influenza / pneumonia | — | — | 5 | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — |
| Suicide | — | — | — | 2 | 2 | 2 | 4 | 5 | — | — | — | — |
| Liver disease | — | — | — | — | — | — | 5 | 4 | — | — | — | — |
| Diabetes | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | 4 | 5 | — | — |
| Chronic lower respiratory disease | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | 5 | 3 | 3 | 5 |
| Stroke | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | 4 | 4 | 3 |
| Alzheimer's disease | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | 5 | 4 |
Rank numbers are CDC/NSC WISQARS-style 2024 rankings; “preventable injury” includes drug poisoning, motor-vehicle, falls, drowning, and other external causes. Falls become one of the dominant preventable-injury mechanisms after 65 even when all-cause tables are led by chronic disease.
Perception vs. reality
The headline filter reverses the risk ranking
Our World in Data summarized a media-coverage study comparing actual US deaths with attention in news and search. Violent, intentional, rare, and vivid causes dominate attention; chronic and mundane causes dominate death.
Chronic risk
Microlives: 30-minute chunks of life expectancy
Micromorts fit acute events. Microlives fit chronic habits. They are population averages, not destiny for a single person.
| Habit or exposure | Microlife estimate | Example | Gotcha |
|---|---|---|---|
| Smoking | −1 per 2 cigarettes | A 10-cigarette day is roughly −5 microlives, about 2.5 hours of life expectancy. | Quitting benefits start quickly, but lifetime pack-years still matter. |
| Alcohol | small negative above low intake | One drink is no longer framed as clearly protective; heavy intake compounds cancer, liver, injury, and sleep risk. | The old J-curve is disputed because of confounding and “sick quitter” bias. |
| Sedentary time | −1 to −2 per long sitting day | Ten seated hours with no exercise is meaningfully worse than a day with movement breaks. | Exercise helps but may not fully erase extreme sitting. |
| Processed meat | negative, dose dependent | Daily processed meat shifts colorectal and cardiovascular risk over years. | Do not convert a sandwich into a precise death probability. |
| PM2.5 air pollution | negative per chronic µg/m³ | A long-term move from 5 to 15 µg/m³ annual PM2.5 meaningfully raises cardiopulmonary risk. | Short wildfire spikes and chronic annual averages are different exposure frames. |
| Obesity | negative at high BMI / central adiposity | Waist circumference plus metabolic markers is more informative than BMI alone. | Fitness, age, disease, and weight history change individual risk. |
| Loneliness / isolation | negative, similar scale to familiar chronic risks | A socially isolated older adult has higher mortality risk even after many health adjustments. | Measurement is noisy; loneliness is not the same as solitude. |
| Exercise | positive, strongest from none to some | Moving from inactive to brisk walking most days can add multiple microlives per day. | The marginal benefit shrinks at high training volumes. |
| Sleep 7-8 hours | positive vs. chronic short sleep | Consistent 5-hour nights raise metabolic, cardiovascular, accident, and mood risks. | Sleep quality and apnea matter; time in bed is not the same as sleep. |
| Statins for high-risk groups | positive when baseline cardiovascular risk is high | A person with prior heart attack has a much larger absolute benefit than a low-risk 30-year-old. | This is not prescribing advice; absolute risk and side effects decide the case. |
| Blood pressure control | positive at sustained hypertension | Lowering persistently high systolic pressure reduces stroke and heart-failure risk. | Low-risk people with normal BP cannot get the same benefit. |
| Vaccination in high-risk groups | positive, event-prevention framed | Influenza/COVID vaccination mainly matters by preventing infection complications in older or high-risk adults. | Use current CDC schedules; risk-benefit depends on age and immune status. |
Microlife framing follows Spiegelhalter’s BMJ work; examples are rounded decision-support translations, not clinical instructions.
Payoff
The levers ranked: what should you actually do?
This is not medical advice. It is a base-rate checklist: prioritize high-exposure, high-mortality, controllable risks before rare vivid fears.
Do not make motorcycles your routine transport.
Replacing 10,000 motorcycle miles with ordinary car miles can save thousands of micromorts per year. This dwarfs most risks people debate.
Cut impaired, distracted, late-night, and high-speed driving.
The national per-mile rate is an average; the tails are dominated by behavior, speed, road type, and vehicle crashworthiness.
After 60, treat falls like a real hazard.
Ladders, roofs, stairs, bathtubs, sedatives, poor lighting, and weak legs are mundane but high-yield targets.
Do not smoke; if you do, reduce and quit.
Microlives make the compounding visible: small daily losses accumulate into years.
Fix sleep apnea and chronic short sleep.
This hits cardiovascular risk, crash risk, mood, and metabolic health at once.
Know your cardiovascular baseline.
Blood pressure, lipids, diabetes, kidney disease, and prior events determine whether interventions have large absolute benefit.
Move from inactive to active.
The first 150 minutes/week of moderate activity beats almost every supplement and many elaborate optimization rituals.
Use boring layers: smoke alarms, seat belts, helmets, naloxone where relevant.
The best risk controls are often cheap, passive, and unglamorous.
Respect heat, water, and drugs more than strangers and sharks.
Heat waves, pools, opioids, alcohol, and familiar settings kill more Americans than cinematic threats.
Buy insurance for ruin, not for fear.
Risk in dollars is not the same as risk in micromorts, but the logic matches: insure catastrophic loss; self-insure annoyances.
Common mistakes
Risk traps that make smart people wrong
Relative risk without absolute risk
“Doubles your risk” is meaningless until you know whether the baseline is 1 in 10 or 1 in 10,000,000. Convert to micromorts or annual absolute risk before reacting.
Per-trip vs. per-mile framing
Flights look terrifying per event and safe per mile. Walking looks safe per trip and less safe beside fast traffic per mile. Pick the frame that matches the decision.
Base-rate neglect
The question is not “Can this happen?” It is “How often does this happen in the exposed population compared with the alternatives?”
Dread risk beats chronic risk emotionally
Terrorism, air crashes, kidnapping, and sharks are vivid. Heart disease, falls, overdose, heat, and routine driving are statistically larger.
Averaging away who is exposed
Population averages are bad personal forecasts when exposure is concentrated: opioid users, motorcyclists, frail elders, pilots, and backcountry travelers are not average.
Confusing decision support with medical advice
A microlife estimate can show where the large effects live. It cannot decide a treatment, pregnancy, procedure, or medication for a specific person.
Freshness and sources
Primary sources used for volatile facts
- CDC/NCHS and NSC WISQARS-style CSV export, “Ranking of leading causes of deaths and death rates by age group and year, 1999-2024, United States,” used for the 2024 age-bracket heatmap.
- NHTSA 2024 traffic fatality rate, 1.20 deaths per 100 million vehicle miles traveled, used for the road-mile micromort conversion.
- USPA Safety FAQ, 2025: 16 civilian skydiving fatalities in 3.47 million jumps, 0.46 deaths per 100,000 jumps.
- CDC/NCHS maternal mortality reporting, 2023 US maternal mortality rate of 18.6 deaths per 100,000 live births.
- David Spiegelhalter’s micromort and microlife work, plus BMJ microlife framing, used for historical adventure-sport and chronic-risk translation.
- Our World in Data summary of Shen et al. media-coverage comparisons, used for the perception-gap section.