Seattle-King County is one of the best areas in the world to have cardiac arrest. Its survival rate of people who undergo cardiopulmonary resuscitation, or CPR, outside of hospitals is 19.9 percent. Nationwide, about 350,000 such resuscitation attempts yield average survival rates of 5 to 10 percent, with great variation across the country. In Detroit, the survival rate is about 3 percent.

These statistics show “a lot more variation in survival than we see for stroke and heart attack,” said Dr. Graham Nichol, professor of medicine at the University of Washington. “Cardiac arrest is indeed a treatable condition.”