Hacker News Reader

Comment by andrepd | Hacker News Reader

> it's a scandal that they're running the world cup in Qatar. A winter world cup pushes the schedules way off what's normal and traditional. That is of course not the only concern, there's also stories about dozens of people dying building these stadiums in the desert heat.

What a paragraph. The death toll is at least in the many thousands, perhaps even >10,000.

View on HN

This source claims 6.5k since 2011: https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2021/feb/23/r...

That's around ~700 deaths per year. But Qatar has ~1.5million workers from India, Nepal, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka. So, ~700/year is not an outrageous number for natural deaths (works out around 0.04%). This is way lower than the death rate in the USA for a young age segment (25-40): https://www.statista.com/statistics/241572/death-rate-by-age...

Qatar is hurting more by not allowing an independent and transparent journalism around the conditions and deaths of these workers. Just shows the idiocy at the top level of their government.

This analysis is assuming all 1.5M peop,e were working on World Cup stuff.

The source is not limited to the World Cup though, but all workers.

Of course transparency in reporting should be the first prerequisite for arranging a World Cup. And unless we have free press showing the opposite, we can only assume the death toll to be higher than reported.

Sources?

I found eg https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2021/feb/23/r... which tries to count all deaths, not just what can be attributed to the football stadiums.

(It's a high death toll in any case. But we should still stick to the facts.)

I said dozens because it seems credible, I didn't look anything up. It's somewhat common for construction workers to die even in the modern world, but my shock is more that it seems worse than most projects (Was it Guardian who had the story about people getting so tired they fell asleep and fell off the stadium roof?), yet most projects are for genuinely useful things like bridges and dams, not entertainment.

> I said dozens because it seems credible, I didn't look anything up.

So you literally just made up a statistic out of nothing and posted it here? Why do you think that’s ok?

Lol....it's an internet forum, not a referenced work like Wikipedia.

Alan:

Dozens of people died of COVID last year.

Beth:

You forking idiot, millions died, not dozens.

Alan:

Okay, so it's a lot of dozens. What's your problem?

There's a big difference between making it up and having a hunch from reading a bit, without the specific sources to hand. There's nothing wrong with that, you can go and do your own research if you want, don't expect me to do it for you.

It's pretty laughable for you to suggest that people can't just say what they want on the internet

Nah you were speaking higher than your hat

"There's a big difference between making it up and having a hunch from reading a bit" - this is the laughable part, because they state a number in the article, so clearly a BIT of reading was the most that was done. Ha. If you're going to just throw out a random but plausible number for your argument's sake, you grab it from the article, if you've read far enough to see it.

It's not a high death toll (they have 1.5million workers of these nationalities). There is no transparent due-process for the identification of the death cause or the investigation of the working conditions. So these numbers don't really translate to much...

Yeah, I'm far more concerned about the apparent slavery of migrant workers in Qatar than about how it affects some schedules.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com