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While it's shoddy statistics, at least in this case the implied effect seems to be real. According to these two sources [1][2] that just came up when I searched for this, prevalence of wearing life-jackets among kayakers appears to be ~78%.

[1] https://injuryprevention.bmj.com/content/4/3/203 [2] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5931488/

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I have very little doubt the effect's real.

Note though that getting base rates from one place and getting rates of accidents from another is usually a bad idea: they will have various ways of measuring the rates, so will have different biases (based on location, time-of-day, time-of-year, ... where the measurement happens).

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