Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Mathematics/2022 July 6

= July 6 =

What likelihood do adults have of dying in the same hospitals that delivered them?
The only example that I could find of somebody dying in the same hospital in which he was born was John Ritter, which leads me to believe that this coincidence is surprisingly rare. — (((Romanophile))) ♞ (contributions) 08:26, 6 July 2022 (UTC)


 * Does it count if I should die in the Tesco store which now occupies the old hospital building? -- Verbarson talkedits 08:45, 6 July 2022 (UTC)
 * Many babies born in a hospital that die shortly after delivery, die in the same hospital. This is not an uncommon occurrence. For most of the time since the arrival of Homo sapiens, there were no hospitals. In many parts of the world, it is unusual to this day for deliveries to take place in hospitals. There, the likelihood will be low. But someone born in a hospital in a town where there is only one hospital (not uncommon), who does not move to another town during their lifetime (also not uncommon), has a fair chance of dying in that same hospital. For a non-mover in a place with N hospitals, born and dying in a hospital, the chance is on the average 1 in N (or somewhat less, because the birth hospital may be specializing in maternity care or have ceased to exist). The fact that few examples can be found can also be ascribed to the fact that this is not a particularly remarkable coincidence and not worth specifically noting. --Lambiam 08:52, 6 July 2022 (UTC)
 * As the demographics of my community have changed, the hospital where my now 40 something children were born is now an aged care centre. This change obviously makes the event under discussion more likely. HiLo48 (talk) 10:23, 6 July 2022 (UTC)


 * I think the main point is that this question can't be answered mathematics alone. There are many factors such as how often people move to another city, how long hospitals remain in use, how long people live, etc. which affect the result. Most of these factors are likely to change over time and be dependent on what part of the world you're talking about. Perhaps the only really reliable way of finding the answer is to look at a random sample of available data, but even then that only tells you what happened in the past and doesn't predict the future. I assume that in the event of a zombie apocalypse or a meteor striking the Earth as in Don't Look Up, the likelihood would go way down. In the case of John Ritter, his father, Tex Ritter, was living in Hollywood to work in movies. Since he was also performing in movies, and movies were still being made in Hollywood, I think that makes the John Ritter's case seem less coincidental. --RDBury (talk) 12:04, 6 July 2022 (UTC)
 * For people born and dying on an island, for example on Jersey, I wouldn't be surprised if quite a lot of them were born and died in Jersey General Hospital. But really, the first question to answer is how many people live their life (or at least their old age) close to where they were born; I expect that in many countries, this is a large percentage of the population. —Kusma (talk) 12:50, 6 July 2022 (UTC)


 * Here's a Wikidata query for the question: . Unfortunately, it relies on the hospital being listed as the person's birth and death place, but most people's entries list the city (if anything). This query returns three entries. One was an infant (ms:Tengku Ahmad Iskandar Shah). The other two were adults who died of Covid-19 (Alexandra Louise Polansky and Juan Sanabria). --Amble (talk) 20:57, 6 July 2022 (UTC)