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The real problem with the article is that it's conflating two things: the absolute rate of survival for cardiac arrest after CPR, and the relative rate of survi
by bscphil 3y ago
The real problem with the article is that it's conflating two things: the absolute rate of survival for cardiac arrest after CPR, and the relative rate of survival for cardiac arrest after CPR (versus doing nothing).
> In real life, people similarly believe that survival after CPR is over 75%.
I'm just a medically ignorant rando, my naive guess was that people survive cardiac arrest without intervention 30% of the time (per the article, the actual rate is 7.6%). Unless you measure people's beliefs about this, you won't be able to determine whether 75% is a good rate or a bad one.
Apparently bystander initiated CPR, out of the hospital, increases those odds to 10%. That means that a third more people will survive if bystanders initiate CPR. That seems ... really good to me? In the hospital, survival after CPR goes up to 17%, which is an increase of 2.2 times! It's actually pretty comparable to someone having naive guesses of 75% CPR survival vs 30% without CPR. (My actual guess was that CPR made a difference about 20% of the time, so all these numbers are way better than that.)