Over 40% of foreigner deaths in Korea have unknown causes | Hacker News Reader

Over 40% of foreigner deaths in Korea have unknown causes

koreatimes.co.kr

45 pointstype030 comments

Just to add context: "unknown causes" was the leading cause of death for Korean citizens as well in 2023 and not just foreigners.

Half of deaths with "unknown causes" is dying from old age. Other factors include SID, etc.

The article says:

This figure is significantly higher compared to the number of deaths among Korean nationals.

With no old medical journal at hand for foreigners I would anticipate 'unknown death reason' to be higher?

"Old age" isn't a cause of death? Maybe more appropriate is "Korea doesn't care about tracking the cause of death."

That, or they are butchering foreigners and old people over there.

I think they're saying more that when the ultimate cause of a fairly unsurprising death is unclear or ambiguous, unlike saying "CHF" or "Brain Death" as the "cause" like we often do, they just say "unknown."

To clarify, heart failure and brain death are going to be part of every death, no matter the ultimate cause, but sometimes if it's a little difficult to pinpoint the actual reason someone whose body was failing kind of across the board died, the doctor declaring death will just pick a failed organ that was clearly linked to the death and point the finger at it.

>To clarify, heart failure and brain death are going to be part of every death

Not entirely related to the topic at hand, but i want to mention it as a darkly amusing anecdote: During the heyday of the Soviet NKVD's (predecessor to the KGB) management of Stalin's monstrous purge of Soviet society, hundreds of thousands of people were killed in all sorts of ways. Many of them died by torture or just by being shot illegally (even by Stalinist Soviet standards) Since publicly acknowledging this made for bad optics even in the Stalinist USSR, a very common formal, officially recorded cause of death in these cases was "heart failure". Why? Because whether you shoot, starve, freeze or beat and torture someone to death, their ultimate cause of death involves the stopping of their heart. It's crudely honest for the sake of superficial legality, without being in the least bit truly honest about the context of what was happening.

Old age isn't a cause of death. It can be a contributing factor, but it isn't an immediate cause.

Well, they also classify suicides as "fan death", saving face is a big thing in that part of the world . Most likely they do know the real cause but chose not to release it if it's not suspicious.

This "fan-death-to-cover-up-suicide" is ABSOLUTELY false and is my greatest pet peeve with the English internet. Someone heard East Asians like to save face and came up with this dehumanizing and derogatory theory. Misconceptions of "fan death" predates any suicidal trends in Korea and if there was any connection to suicides we koreans would be the ones talking about it non-stop.

> Most likely the do know the real cause but chose not to release it

NO!!!! we are regular people with regular emotions, too. Stereotypes you see on the internet are often outdated by decades. In this case it was never even true in the first place.

Tangentially related, but a lot of the discourse about societies that people are not a part of end up being similar to the discourse around corporations people are not a part of. Folks come up with reasons for why things are the case, and if you are actually part of the thing under discussion it is a mystifying and frustrating experience to see basically everyone is wrong, all the time.

This process really harmed my view of the utility of public discussion of anything. In quality it is about as bad as the average newspaper article. As you are perhaps aware, if the article is about something you know you will realise nearly every article is entirely fabricated. Lots of research papers (at least in the computer science domain) are the same: fabrications that can't be reproduced. Either the algorithm is not published so you can't validate the data or the algorithm is published and the data is just entirely unrelated to it.

Thinking about it, it's kind of a miracle humanity gets anywhere at all. Almost every public resource is aggressively ignorant.

Fan death predating the rise in suicide trends makes it seem more likely to me that fan death was used to obscure a suicide.

What is your perspective on what it is?

All we know is people were already talking about this in 1910.

So why do you think it is offensive to suggest it’s a polite way of obscuring a suicide?

That feels like the most charitable way to interpret people claiming fans are a lethal hazard?

I once asked a Korean MD/PhD about fan deaths. I was expecting her to say, "Oh, people don't really believe in that. It's just something a few grandmas worry about." What she actually said was, "Oh yeah, that's really dangerous."

I hope that's not a sign of the general state of MD/PhD thinking in Korean society, considering how, you know, absurdly, obviously, stupidly mistaken the notion of fans suffocating people in closed rooms is.

I'd definitely not want a doctor with such a belief coming within a mile of treating me for anything.

Yeah nobody believes it now but back then everybody did. We treated it exactly like how we believe airplanes fly. Some air flow and fluid dynamics. Airplanes fly so why not fan deaths? I guess doctors passed it off as physics and physicians passed it off as physiology.

Whenever someone jumped off a building at my engineering school, they were Korean.

A lot of SK's foreigner workforce are unskilled laborers from poorer countries. So one explanation could be work related but unspecified due to company reputation or that no one simply cares about poor foreign workers.

I am sure it's more benign than that, although of course exploiting foreign labor is an issue. South Korea has problems but it is a liberal democracy whose economy does not depend on cheap manual labor like the UAE; if large numbers of foreign workers were being killed on the job, a Korean citizen or rights group would blow the whistle.

I believe South Korea (like most industrialized countries) does not offer single-payer health insurance to most foreigners, who either have to purchase it themselves or go without. It seems likely that a large number of foreign residents get sick and never go to a doctor. Without a medical history it's not easy to determine a cause of natural death in an older sick person, even with a good autopsy.

Most industrialized countries do offer single payer healthcare to taxpaying foreigners, perhaps after a reasonable period of time.

No, they offer single-payer healthcare to legal permanent residents. There is a significant gap with temporary residents, including people shuffling back and forth on work visas which might get shadily overextended with under-the-table work, or undocumented immigrants (no reason to use a dishonest and inflammatory term like “taxpaying foreigners” when you mean “legal residents,” paying taxes is not the issue).

In most of the industrialized world you can't pay taxes if you're not there legally. And there is no need to be a permanent resident for single payer healthcare in most countries, just to be there working legally for some time.

I wrote "taxpaying foreigner" as opposed to "permanent resident" because most industrialized countries do indeed offer their healthcare to non-permanent residents on work visas. For example in Ontario after 90 days you have access to single payer healthcare. In France you get it after 3 months, in Spain after 2-6 months depending on the locality, etc...

> No, they offer single-payer healthcare to legal residents

Don't always need to be permanent. 2 year work visas will often get you covered, caveated with the idea that you're working a job and paying taxes.

many educational visas also cover this, depending on where you're going and where you're from. e.g. Most Europeans in Australia on valid visas have coverage due to reciprocal agreements

This is South Korea we're talking about here, not some 3rd world ship scrapping yard. 4/10 foreign person deaths being workplace deaths would be insane when you consider how many foreign workers are employed in mundane service industry jobs with basically no risk of dying on the job.

A huge proportion of foreign workers in SK are in either the manufacturing, construction, or agriculture sectors, often with poor working/living conditions.

https://www.chosun.com/english/industry-en/2024/06/26/IL43VM...

https://www.latimes.com/world-nation/story/2023-10-30/south-...

https://www.bis.org/publ/bppdf/bispap100_m.pdf

Well, people in those jobs aren't very likely to be showing up on either side of that ratio.

The obvious follow-up question would be: is there a correlation between specific nationalities and the fraction of "unknown cause" deaths?

Fans

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fan_death

Whenever it’s simply stated we are talking about Korea, I always assume we are talking about North Korea: the only and best Korea.

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