Coded X23
The United States certified 788 deaths from hornet, wasp and bee stings between 2011 and 2021. The card rounds that average to about 70, and it says United States.
The code on the certificate is X23, in the International Classification of Diseases: contact with hornets, wasps and bees, as the underlying cause of death. From 2011 to 2021 the National Vital Statistics System counted 788 such deaths in the United States. That is 72 a year. The years ran from 59 to 89. About 84 per cent of the people were male.
The card says about 70, which is the Ledger's usual rounding, and it says United States on the rate line. A world total is not what this series is. Using the American average as if it were the planet would repeat the lift card's mistake, which is why the geography is printed on the card rather than left to the essay.
Why the noun matches
The count is deaths with that underlying cause. It is not "sting incidents", and it is not every allergic reaction that happened to end in a death coded some other way. A certificate study is still a certificate study: it sees what was written down, in one country, under one code. Within those limits it is a current official count, which the vending-machine card it replaced was not. That card was 37 deaths in the United States from 1978 to 1995.
Snakes are the animal people reach for. In the same American certificate file, hornets, wasps and bees are the venomous contact that accounts for the deaths. The global snakebite toll is a different order of magnitude, around 100,000 deaths a year in the neglected-disease estimates, and it is not given a rare card. Scale is the whole point of the column.