This article in Grid says there are about 70 shark attacks on humans per year, worldwide. That’s attacks, not deaths. This article doesn’t have the death numbers, but I recall seeing elsewhere that it is typically single digits. And it’s not because sharks are not around where people are swimming – they are.

Humans are pathetic in the water. If sharks wanted to eat them, it would be so easy for them. If they tasted good and a shark were like, “Oh, my goodness, there is a human, let me have a bite,” there would be between 10,000 and 50,000 bites a day. There’s a lot of sharks in the ocean and a lot of people that are recreating there.

We don’t see that. We see very few, about 70 a year. And although there are 70, more than half of them are in poor visibility water where the shark makes a mistake. So the fact that the bites that we do see are where conditions are turbid and where people happen to be intersecting with where there are sharks sort of underscores the notion that sharks do not eat people — we aren’t on the menu.

Grid

So if we are trying to be rational, we shouldn’t even worry about sharks, even compared to other things that can and do go wrong in the water, most obviously drowning.