A dog attack in Timaru made national news today. One person injured, emergency services called, the incident deemed serious enough to report.

Meanwhile, 400,836 New Zealanders suffered serious non-fatal injuries last year that didn't make headlines. That's 1,098 people every single day. More than 45 every hour. (Source: Stats NZ / ACC, fatal-serious-injuries)

These aren't paper cuts. ACC classifies a serious injury as one requiring significant medical treatment: fractures, dislocations, severe lacerations, crushing injuries, amputations. The kind of injury that changes your week, your month, sometimes your life.

The trajectory is stark. In 2020, New Zealand recorded 362,685 serious injuries. Four years later, we're at 400,836. That's an extra 38,151 serious injuries in just four years, a 10.5% jump.

The year-on-year increases tell the story of a country getting more dangerous to live in. From 2020 to 2021: up 6,969 injuries. From 2021 to 2022: up 21,774. From 2022 to 2023: up 2,250. From 2023 to 2024: up 7,158.

Only one of those years showed a slowdown, and even that year still added more than 2,000 serious injuries to the national total.

These numbers represent real people. Someone's dad breaking his leg badly enough to need surgery. A teenager dislocating a shoulder so severely it requires hospital admission. A retail worker suffering a workplace injury that keeps them off their feet for weeks.

And unlike fatal injuries, which have remained relatively flat over the same period, serious non-fatal injuries keep climbing. The gap between the two trends is widening. We're getting better at keeping people alive, but not at keeping them safe.

The scale is difficult to grasp. If you lined up everyone who suffered a serious injury in New Zealand last year, you'd fill Eden Park eight times over. That's the entire population of Tauranga.

Put another way: one in every 13 New Zealanders suffered a serious injury in 2024. If you know 13 people, statistically one of them needed significant medical intervention for an injury last year.

This isn't a story about one dog attack in Timaru. This is a story about a country where serious injuries have become background noise. Where more than a thousand people getting hurt every day is somehow not news.

Until it happens to you.