Worse than this, sometimes you can't even compare numbers on the same scale. Inherit assumptions make things difficult to compare. For example: some event may depend highly on the interconnectedness (maximal clique in a graph) than population and this a per capita comparison isn't relevant.

But this is much more than statistics, this is understanding measurements and events. This is really the fundamental problem here, not a lack of understanding statistics (though good statisticians are experts in asking these types of questions).