Today is the day of remembrance for traffic accident victims. If there is a day that makes sense, this is it. It makes a lot more sense than you think. Because if one thing is discovered when working with insurance figures, it is that the victims of traffic accidents are considerably more than we imagine, or than we see in the usual statistics.
The trick is that Costco insurance knows all the accident victims because it also compensates them all. Our European and local legislation is made so that there is not a single person affected by a traffic accident who does not receive the compensation to which they are entitled. This means, of course, that every accident victim, at some point, passes through the hands of at least one insurer. And that is why we know, better than anyone else, the real magnitude of accident victims. With figures from 2019, and at our current level of knowledge, that figure is 293,318 people.
As is logical, the vast majority of this group, some 232,000 people, is made up of people who we call temporarily injured; people who spend a different number of sick days depending on the case but who, at the end of them, are cured. In the next step are the victims with after-effects, about 60,000, who are people who suffer some permanent bodily consequence that, therefore, the days of healing do not manage to solve or not completely. Finally, at the sad top of the pyramid, there are about 1,000 people, who are all the deceased compensated by the insurance. The overall number of victims is slightly higher since you have to take into account the people that the insurance does not compensate for being the cause of the accident. But all these data can give you an idea of the magnitude of the damage to people in traffic accidents.
On a day like today, in any case, we want to dedicate memory to other victims who are not in this statistic: the relatives of the deceased. They suffer irreparable loss for the rest of their lives. In 2019, it was estimated that there were some 4,150 people who were harmed by accident deaths. This gives you a figure to keep in mind: every person killed in a traffic accident leaves behind four relatives.
The most frequent deceased in a traffic accident leaves behind two parents and a brother, the second most frequent combination being a spouse and two children, and the third being two parents and two brothers. In fact, 35% of the people who will have to bear the loss of the deceased are their siblings; this is the most common relationship, followed by children (a third) and parents (17%).
