The official number of seriously injured people on the road is not very meaningful. A more comprehensive statistic now gives realistic values - and they are high.
The number of seriously injured road traffic accidents has been falling for years. However, the proportion of seriously injured remains high, as the Federal Government's current “Accident Prevention Report” shows. Accordingly, studies indicate that the proportion of particularly seriously injured accident victims among all seriously injured in Germany is stagnating at the same level or even increasing slightly. Projections for the years 2014 to 2018 showed proportions between 22 and 24 percent, in 2018 the projected number of seriously injured people in Germany was 15.392 people.
The figures now published close an important gap in assessing the number of accidents on German roads. Scientists and traffic safety associations have been calling for a sharper separation within the group of seriously injured people for years. The official statistics have a wide range of accident victims under this name: According to the definition of the official statistics, an accident victim who has been admitted to a hospital for at least 24 hours is seriously injured. A simple concussion can be enough for this - an injury that should not be considered particularly serious in common parlance.
The accident prevention report therefore makes a more precise separation and at least extrapolates the number of particularly severely injured persons: Within the group of seriously injured persons, all persons who have a significant medical need for treatment and who have to contend with consequential damage after discharge are considered seriously injured. The European member states have agreed to use the “Maximum Abbreviated Injury Scale” (MAIS) with a threshold value of MAIS3 + to differentiate the seriously injured from the other seriously injured people.