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Drowning in the News, 2019–2026: Seasonality, Geography and Tone of Global Drowning Coverage, and How It Compares with Research and Invention

Year: 2026
Type: article
Abstract: We measure how drowning was covered in a global news index from January 2019 to July 2026, using 74,191 de-duplicated drowning articles, and set that coverage beside 2,500 research papers and 916 patent families on drowning. Six results stand out: Seasonality. On average 37.76% of each year's drowning coverage appears in June, July and August. July alone holds 14.67%. Attention, not occurrence. Drowning took a 42.9% smaller share of news in 2020 than in 2019. Its share peaked in July 2019, at 12.35 articles per 10,000, and the 2025 share was 27.9% below 2019. Geography. India's share of located drowning news is 2.15 times its share of all news. The United States, the largest source of located articles (37.67%), is under-represented at 0.78. Oceania (2.04) is the most over-represented continent. Within India, Madhya Pradesh (1.86), Goa (1.82) and Odisha (1.81) lead; within the United States, Hawaii (2.93), Arizona (2.22) and South Carolina (2.19). Drowning's share of Indian news fell to 0.65 times its 2023 level by 2025. Tone and urgency. 85.8% of drowning articles are negative in tone (all news: 33.6%), and 87.3% are rated critical priority (all news: 42.6%). Prevention in the news. Children's and adults' swimming lessons and lifeguard training are rare themes, but each is between 273.88 and 375.13 times as frequent in drowning news as in all news. Child mortality is a theme of 12.5% of themed drowning articles. Research and invention. Drowning papers grew from 0.25 to 0.43 per 10,000 papers between 2015 and 2025 (1.74-fold). Patent families grew 2.17-fold from 2015 to 2024, and 82.9% of office filings were at China's office.
DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.23446405
Language: English
Subfield: Communication
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W7222902174
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