A dog attack in Timaru made the news today. One person injured. Worth reporting, absolutely. But here's what didn't make headlines: 24,129 fewer young New Zealanders suffered serious injuries in 2024 compared to three years earlier.

In 2021, ACC logged 40,086 serious injuries to people under 30. By 2024, that figure sat at 15,957. That's a 60% drop in three years. (Source: Stats NZ / ACC, fatal-serious-injuries)

To understand how dramatic that is, you need to know where we started. In 2000, 23,964 young Kiwis were seriously injured. The number climbed steadily through the 2000s, peaking around 2010. Then it stayed high, bouncing between 35,000 and 40,000 annually for a decade.

2020 arrived. COVID lockdowns. Suddenly: 39,297 serious injuries. Still high, but the pattern was holding. 2021: 40,086. The highest in years. Young people were back doing everything they'd been doing before the pandemic, maybe more.

Then something changed. 2022: 17,055 serious injuries. The number fell off a cliff. More than half the previous year, gone. Not a gentle decline. A collapse.

2023: 16,425. The drop held. 2024: 15,957. Lower still. We're now at the lowest level since at least 2000, when the dataset begins. And nobody's talking about it.

What counts as a serious injury in ACC's data? Hospitalisation. Permanent disability. Death. These aren't scraped knees. These are the injuries that derail lives, cost hundreds of thousands in treatment, take months or years to recover from.

So what happened between 2021 and 2022? The data doesn't tell you why, only what. But the timing matters. COVID restrictions were easing, not tightening. Young people weren't suddenly staying home. Workplaces weren't shutting down. Sports resumed. Travel opened up.

Yet somehow, in the middle of all that return to normal life, serious injuries to under-30s dropped by 57% in a single year. And kept dropping.

This is where data gets frustrating. It shows you something massive, something that touches tens of thousands of families, and then leaves you to guess at the mechanism. Better workplace safety rules? Changes in how injuries get classified? A shift in youth behaviour? All of the above?

What we know for certain: 24,000 young New Zealanders didn't end up seriously injured in 2024 who would have, had the 2021 rate held. That's 24,000 families who didn't get the phone call. 24,000 people who didn't spend months in recovery. 24,000 futures that stayed on track.

Today's news will focus on the individual incidents. One dog attack. One recall. One abuse case. Each matters. But step back, and the bigger story is this: something changed in New Zealand between 2021 and 2022 that made life dramatically safer for an entire generation. We just don't know what it was.