Is Thailand the 12th deadliest travel destination? Nope, actual data finds.

We all love to be ranked, and while being first can be something to brag about, it feels pretty bad to have your home ranked the world’s 12th most “deadly travel destination” by an unknown insurance company with a poor understanding of how to read data.

Thailand was given a depressing score of -209.24, aka a “D-,” in the parlance of U.S. insurance firm The Swiftest, which not only relied on old data sources but failed to interpret them correctly.

Not to say that Thailand has a crap safety record in some areas – its road fatalities remain among the world’s worst and worthy of the “F” assigned in the ranking. 

However, to claim that poor hygiene and communicable diseases warrant failing grades is risible and contradicted by the very data that it cites. For example, the 2016 World Bank data it relies on shows Thailand had a very low mortality…