Fatalities certainly aren't the whole story, but they do have one "advantage": they cannot be hushed away, at least not in the Western world. (In China or Russia, well...)

That is why, in an analogical situation, crime and public safety of individual countries is often compared using murder levels. It is expected that most developed countries cannot really suppress/fudge murder statistics, even though they can do a lot of shenanigans around registration of lesser crime.

I can see a similar situation with individual corporations and their diligence when it comes to reporting injuries.