You could also trip in a staircase and die. I'd wager the outcomes are about equally likely. Why stop with a helmet? You should always wear knee protectors and any other amount of protective gear.

Simply put, the helmet is a political device invoked to get rid of cyclists on public streets and mask the actual risk (cars, by many orders of magnitude, and not only to cyclists, but also pedestrians). As astute people have noticed, helmets are basically absent in countries that have sane city infrastructure transport design and dedicate just a fraction of the resources to making cycling possible for everyone.

But we can't expect people to ask for that infrastructure when they don't even know what it should look like. You note "Dutch drivers are more aware of cyclists", missing the most important feature of Dutch infra: there is physical separation that makes the mistakes of human car drivers (universally useless) mostly riskless.