Catastrophic Injury Statistics

As you can imagine, catastrophic injuries are very serious in nature. These types of injuries can leave you with bodily damage that can take years to repair. Some catastrophic injuries can even cause lifelong harm.

Unfortunately, catastrophic injuries occur all the time for various reasons. Some of the most common causes of catastrophic injuries are a result of:

Car and semi-truck accidents
Pedestrian accidents
Slips and falls
Medical malpractice
Fires and explosions

It can be useful to understand the data in order to help prevent these sorts of injuries from occurring. Here are some catastrophic injury statistics you should know:

The Data

The data presented below has been gathered from the National Safety Council (NSC), a nonprofit group that has been dedicated to advocating for American safety for over 100 years.

There were 48.3 million injuries in the United States during 2019.
These injuries cost $1.0979 trillion to treat.
There were 173,040 preventable injury-related deaths during 2019.
- This number is up 3.5% from 167,127 during 2018.
- Comparably, there were 86,777 preventable injury-related deaths during 1992.
  - This is a 99% increase over the last 27 years.

When comparing 2019 to 2018, deaths:
- At home increased by 4.9%,
- In public increased 4.7%, and
- At work increased 1.8%.
The only sector that saw a decrease in deaths during 2019 was car accidents, which was down by 0.8%.

The increase in preventable deaths can primarily be attributed to a 5% increase in both poisoning deaths (including opioid overdoses) and fall fatalities.