Staff Writer Owen Fitzgerald-Diaz is filled with morbid curiosity about the world and decided to sit down and do the math on how many people are in the Hudson on an average day, dead or alive.

CW: This post discusses topics of suicide and death.

First, let’s start with the obvious- how many dead people are there in the Hudson on a given Tuesday? We’ll be considering only areas on the lower Hudson (New York City, and Hudson and Bergen Counties in New Jersey), nothing further north like Poughhoweveryousayit or whatever else is upstate. I’m just including the whole city despite the fact that Staten Island, Brooklyn, and Queens don’t touch the Hudson because breaking down homicide data by borough would’ve been annoying, and also because people can probably just drive or put stuff in a suitcase The Americans-style and take the subway. I’m also not including Westchester County, purely because I started getting lazy as I was “”””researching”””” this, and this is already going the extra mile for a CC boi who can barely manage FroSci.

Let’s lay out some data:

• New York City saw 287 murders in 2018 (and 292 murders in 2017- that will be important later)
• NYPD had an annualized clearance rate on homicide cases of about 77.35% in 2018 (88.1% in the first quarter, 61.8% in the second quarter, 84.1% in the third quarter, and 75.4% in the fourth quarter)
• Hudson County, New Jersey saw 21 murders in 2017 (which, when compared to New York’s 292 murders, and given Hudson County’s population of about 700,000 and New York’s of about 8.6 million, means that they both had roughly one murder per 30,000-ish inhabitants per year)

I then made a series of assumptions, based purely on instinct:

• About 25% of unsolved homicide victims are pulled out of the Hudson
• About 15% of solved homicide victims are pulled out of the Hudson
• Bergen County and Hudson County have the same murder rate and clearance rate as New York City
• We can disregard missing persons cases, since hopefully they’re still alive
• We can disregard random people who’ve died of natural causes falling into the Hudson because that just doesn’t seem like something that would happen
• We can disregard suicides, since there are better places to drown yourself and I’m guessing anyone jumping off the George Washington Bridge would be destroyed on impact thoroughly enough that you probably couldn’t tell

This results in a total of 59 bodies floating down the lower Hudson every year (49 or 50 from NYC, 5 or 6 from Bergen County, and about 4 from Hudson County). 59 divided by 365 gives you about 0.16 bodies per day. This can be interpreted two ways- either there’s no dead body in the water 84% of the time (assuming that bodies can’t be non-integer values), or there’s about 16% of a dead body in the water all the time. I really hope it’s the former and not the latter.

However, we should also consider the perhaps more troubling question of how many living people are in the Hudson every day, for their plight is far more concerning- what sort of person would voluntarily immerse themselves in that diseased gash? Let’s consider the data we have on how many people swim in the Hudson every year:

• I’ve seen about 6 people in the Hudson over the last year
• All of them were like a week ago on someone’s Instagram story

With this in mind, I then did some quick math before jumping to conclusions- in Bergen and Hudson Counties and the island of Manhattan, there are about 3.3 million people. With this in mind, I made some extrapolations based on the data available:

• About 10% of those 3.3 million people spend any significant amount of time in close enough proximity to the river to see individuals in the water every year or see it at that proximity through someone else’s camera
• Those 10% tend to see about 6 people every year, like me, since from what little I know about statistics, it’s likely that I am an average member of this population rather than an outlier
• We can disregard the potential of unseen swimmers since anyone choosing to swim in the Hudson is crazy enough that they won’t bother to hide it

This means that almost 2,000,000 people are swimming in the lower Hudson every year (1,980,000, to be exact), giving us between 5,424 and 5,425 people in the Hudson on any given day. If we include dead bodies, that number pushes closer to the 5,425 side of the scale, coming to an exact value of 5,424.82. The prospect of living people swimming in the Hudson also offers us a pleasant solution to the concern about bodies coming in non-integer values: someone could just be getting in up to the chest or something, and all the dead bodies might be intact!

In conclusion, please do not swim or dump bodies in the Hudson.