Thanks for doing the back of the envelope calculation here! This made me view blood donation as significantly more effective than I did before. A few points:
Your second source doesn’t exactly say that one third of blood is used during emergencies, but rather that 1/3rd is used in “surgery and emergencies including childbirth”. Not all surgeries are emergencies, and not all emergencies are potentially fatal.
However, I think this is more than balanced out by the fact that according to the same source, the other two thirds are used to treat “medical conditions including anemia, cancer, and blood disorders.” A lot of those conditions are potentially fatal, so I think it probably actually ends up at more than 1/3rd of blood donated going to life-saving interventions.
I’d love to see someone do the full calculation sometime. Based on this, I expect that for a lot of people, donating blood is sufficiently effective that they should do it once in a while, even instead of an hour of effective work or earning-to-give.
Thanks for doing the back of the envelope calculation here! This made me view blood donation as significantly more effective than I did before. A few points:
Your second source doesn’t exactly say that one third of blood is used during emergencies, but rather that 1/3rd is used in “surgery and emergencies including childbirth”. Not all surgeries are emergencies, and not all emergencies are potentially fatal.
However, I think this is more than balanced out by the fact that according to the same source, the other two thirds are used to treat “medical conditions including anemia, cancer, and blood disorders.” A lot of those conditions are potentially fatal, so I think it probably actually ends up at more than 1/3rd of blood donated going to life-saving interventions.
I’d love to see someone do the full calculation sometime. Based on this, I expect that for a lot of people, donating blood is sufficiently effective that they should do it once in a while, even instead of an hour of effective work or earning-to-give.