This is a bit of looking at the statistics the wrong way.

I'm a skydiving instructor, btw, with about 2,000 jumps.

Skydiving is remarkably safe considering all the factors involved. That's primarily for two reasons: The gear and the training

* Like anything in aviation, the gear has iterated over the years to be very safe. Skydiving in the early days was less safe. We have better gear now that has made it much safer. Same for aviation: Airplanes have a lot of safety features that they didn't have decades ago, and fatalities and incidents in general are extremely rare.

* Training has come a long way as well, with a more standardized curriculum and like the gear, iterations over the decade to address weak points. Procedures have been developed so when faced with a situation, we can react instead of analyze. Problem solving in the sky is not a good option. So the likely things that could happen, we have procedures for that we memorize. They're simple for solo skydivers, and a bit more complicated for a tandem instructor.

With well maintained gear and proper currency on procedures, skydiving is very safe. The most common issues are sprained ankles or broken wrists from band landings.

So what causes the deaths?

Like the rest of aviation, we are the biggest risk factors: Human error.

One of the leading reasons why skydivers are killed is a sport called "swooping", which is spinning a parachute to build speed and planning out right above the ground. It's a sport with very little margin for error. 10 feet can meant the difference of dragging your toe across the water for an epic video clip or a broken femur (or worse). In skydiving, femur is a verb. "I heard so-and-so femured". Do a Google search on it and you can see both why swooping is appealing the practitioners and also dangerous as fuck.

A tandem jump doesn't involve swooping. So by virtue of being a tandem passenger, the leading cause of death of skydivers is eliminated. Lumping all skydives together from a risk perspective doesn't make much sense, given the wide variety of risks associated with various types of skydiving. Tandem skydives, while not risk free, are among the least risky skydives done.

The death of the 18 year old tandem passenger at Lodi was essentially human error. The tandem instructor had a malfunction (the drogue didn't inflate) and didn't react according to the training developed. There was a whole controversy about how the instructor examiner didn't train the new instructors correctly and just signed them off anyway. The death was sadly mostly a failure of training and procedures. The gear malfunctioned, as all gear can, but the proper procedures likely would've resulted in a mildly interesting story told over beers instead of a tragedy.