Please vaccinate yourselves and loved ones even for the flu.
I would also highly recommend people go through this app [2] to get some familiarity with CPR. Then take a proper CPR course (I need to take my own advice on doing a proper course, actually).
I have yet to see one that's properly locked up [that didn't have easy to break emergency glass, anyway]. My workplace has a few in special AED boxes, but those have the emergency glass and the hammer.
So don't expect miracles where none are currently possible. Do all you can obviously in case of need, and ideally make yourself familiar with procedures a bit, any delay will worsen the chances.
According to their material, the 30-day survival rate in Denmark has gone from 3.8% (2001) to 10.4% in 2016, with 67.5% bystander assistance: https://hjertestarter.dk/english/you-can-save-lives though it's not clear how much the programme itself can claim.
According to various papers, rapid CPR/AED after a heart attack can triple survival rates.
It's still pretty bleak outcome, but better than e.g. in 2002 Detroit, where 1 out of 471 out of hospital cardiac arrests (OHCA) survived to hospital discharge. In USA, all those stats are apparently being tracked by a programmed called CARES.
Fortunately, it costs about the same! but still...
https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/68/wr/mm6806a2.htm
Couldn't find the prayer stats.
I doubt there are any. It seems like a study fraught with problems, to put it mildly.
The longer I was there, the more the discussion became "Our child is facing X surgery. Have you or your child had this surgery? Pros? Cons? Any good tips?"
Prayer very often means "It's hopeless. Humans can't fix this. Our only hope is divine intervention." And it's hugely depressing and disempowering.
Modern feelings of hopelessness and nihilism extremely common in the western world, many people are dealing with these feelings through medication. The effectiveness of regular prayer on mental health is surprising according to studies and demographic data.
Let me rephrase that: When the people around you offer nothing but prayers, it's often because they don't believe there is any practical support they are capable of offering. In a group setting, if everyone offers you prayers and zero practical support, the signal it sends is pretty depressing.
To be clear, this was a support group for a deadly genetic disorder that frequently kills children before they reach adulthood. It is classified as a dread disease for a reason. The psychological effect of the diagnosis is huge.
It's practically a sign on the wall a la "All those who enter herein are damned." kind of thing.
If I had to guess I would estimate a prayer to be as effective as a placebo, but to proclaim that as fact seems a bit unscientific.
No affects have been found.
> In 1872, the Victorian scientist Francis Galton made the first statistical analysis of third-party prayer. He hypothesized, partly as satire, that if prayer were effective, members of the British Royal Family would live longer than average, given that thousands prayed for their well-being every Sunday, and he prayed over randomized plots of land to see whether the plants would grow any faster, and found no correlation in either case.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Studies_on_intercessory_prayer
there's been a number of studies showing lots of effects. Most studies seem to show slight positive effects from prayer, some show none and some show negative effects.
> Meta-studies of the literature in the field have been performed showing evidence only for no effect or a potentially small effect.
I'm an atheist so I take the "no effect" over the "small effect".
I take what I consider to be the simplest explanation in the absence of a credible alternative, that prayer does nothing when the recipient is unaware of it.
I take that view because I've never heard an alternative explaination that didn't appear to break the second law of thermodynamics.
A magical, invisible, omnipresent, omnipotent "all known laws of nature defying"-being that answers prayers, requires significantly more evidence than a small effect in some meta study.
A more properly scientific line of reasoning would be to instead say that you'll assume the small-to-nonexistent effect is nonexistent until somebody produces a model capable of predicting the proposed small effect, or a myriad other arguments along the same general lines.