Fire alarms basically don’t help with fire deaths at all
Is that true? I don’t think there’s amazing evidence, but my sense is that it’s sufficient to expect fire alarms help. I think the study designs look like:
Difference in fire deaths when there are working fire alarms. To help with confounders, they try and do within neighbourhood comparison. Obviously that won’t be sufficient, but still
Do a campaign in a neighbourhood to get people to install fire alarms, and see the before and after of fire deaths. Unfortunately, I think most campaigns also include education, and at least increase the saliency of fire, so that makes it harder to tell
Tending to see things like earlier evacuation with fire alarms, and an association between evacuation time and mortality
Is that true? I don’t think there’s amazing evidence, but my sense is that it’s sufficient to expect fire alarms help. I think the study designs look like:
Difference in fire deaths when there are working fire alarms. To help with confounders, they try and do within neighbourhood comparison. Obviously that won’t be sufficient, but still
Do a campaign in a neighbourhood to get people to install fire alarms, and see the before and after of fire deaths. Unfortunately, I think most campaigns also include education, and at least increase the saliency of fire, so that makes it harder to tell
Tending to see things like earlier evacuation with fire alarms, and an association between evacuation time and mortality