From the article.. but yeah, with 30 million people traveling on cruise ships it's hard to tell if this is worse than regular traffic.
(Wouldn't surprise me, if cruise ships are skechy)
So it would require 3,000 deaths per year to approach cars.
It actually works out reasonable as an estimate: if you spend 1-2 hours in a car each day, that’s 4-8% of your year; a week on a cruise ship would be 2% of a year. So we’re within an order of magnitude on exposure to each.
So with 30 people per year dying to falling off boats, it’s much, much less dangerous than cars.
Drunk people manage to die in shallow water with an alarming regularity. I wonder if it is even possible to save a drunk MOB in a calm sea. Stopping a cruise ship and getting a rescue boat ready to action must take a couple of minutes. Maybe a a drone could do it.