Deaths from falling out of bed in the US

As the cost of a 30-second Super Bowl ad has grown from extravagant to genuinely obscene, bed-fall deaths have risen with a correlation of 0.991 that connects the most expensive airtime in television to the most mundane cause of death in geriatric medicine. The ad costs seven million dollars, the bed rail costs forty dollars, and the chart treats both expenditures with the same mathematical seriousness. One is a marketing decision. The other is an infrastructure failure. The coefficient does not care.

Super Bowl ad costs grew from about 2.5 million per 30-second spot in 2005 to over 7 million by 2021, driven by declining broadcast television audiences making the Super Bowl—one of the last mass-audience events—more valuable. Bed-fall deaths rose with the aging population. Both are smooth upward curves across seventeen years, producing a near-perfect correlation. The ad buyers and the bed-fall victims have nothing in common except occupying the same country at the same time.

Seventeen years of Super Bowl ad costs and bed-fall deaths is a correlation that juxtaposes the absurd expense of American advertising with the preventable tragedy of American geriatric care. Seven million dollars buys 30 seconds of attention. Forty dollars buys a bed rail that prevents a death. The chart puts both numbers on the same axes and draws a perfect line, which is either the most American thing statistics has ever produced or the most damning.