How does the china accident/lab ratio compare to the rest of the world?
There have been plenty of harmful and lethal accidents in US labs over the years as well. In neither country are these accidents common - they still make news when they occur, so with >4x the population could mean we think that they're occurring "all the time" simply because (say) we could be hearing about an accident in china multiple times a year, for years before we hear about an accident in the US say, and so on for other countries.
It reminds me of people losing their minds over suicide rates in Chinese factories, because they looked at them in absolute terms and didn't comprehend the size of the factories. The factories with "insane" suicide rates had lower average suicide rates than the US, or even the china average.
What if the U.S. had more deaths? Does that mean China would not need to make their labs safer? What if the US had fewer deaths, what would that mean? What is the point of your question?
All accidents should cause administrators to see if there are lessons that could be taken to improve safety.
My comment was a response to the article being clearly "this is a problem in china" rather than "this is a general problem in academia". I suspect it's the latter, so framing this as a "Chinese problem" doesn't do anything to help people who aren't in China.
Readit News
There have been plenty of harmful and lethal accidents in US labs over the years as well. In neither country are these accidents common - they still make news when they occur, so with >4x the population could mean we think that they're occurring "all the time" simply because (say) we could be hearing about an accident in china multiple times a year, for years before we hear about an accident in the US say, and so on for other countries.
It reminds me of people losing their minds over suicide rates in Chinese factories, because they looked at them in absolute terms and didn't comprehend the size of the factories. The factories with "insane" suicide rates had lower average suicide rates than the US, or even the china average.
My comment was a response to the article being clearly "this is a problem in china" rather than "this is a general problem in academia". I suspect it's the latter, so framing this as a "Chinese problem" doesn't do anything to help people who aren't in China.