Earlier this month, three people were injured in shark attacks along Florida's Panhandle. On Friday, another person in Florida, this time in the state's northeast, was bitten by a shark, leaving him seriously injured. Nassau County Sheriff Bill Leeper said Friday that shortly after 11am local time that day, his department's Marine Unit picked up on a distress call over emergency radio, reports the Florida Times-Union.
When deputies got to the boat in question, they found a man "bleeding pretty badly," with what appeared to be a nasty shark bite to his right forearm, said Leeper. "Acting swiftly, a deputy boarded the vessel and applied a tourniquet to stop the bleeding," the sheriff's department wrote in a Facebook post, per CNN. That deputy then drove the vessel to a nearby boat ramp, where the injured man was airlifted to a hospital. The man has been listed in critical condition, but doctors expect him to recover.
According to the International Shark Attack File, this is only the ninth verified unprovoked shark attack to take place in Nassau County since 1882. The last time the county saw such an attack was in 2018, when two people were bitten. "Researchers stress that fatal shark bites are extremely rare," per the Times-Union, which adds that the odds of dying in a shark attack in the US are 1 in 3,748,06. "Humans are 30 times more likely to be struck by lightning in Florida than to be bitten by a shark," notes the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission. (More shark attack stories.)
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