system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
Does concentrated effort to stay conscious increase survival chances from a knife\gunshot wound? 

When the action movie heroes scream at their dying friends to stay with them or not to drift away, is there any point in that and any data backing it up?
gpt
RN here. There is data that coincides with this, but does not back it up. People who are unconscious are much more likely to die than people that are conscious. But this has nothing to do with consciousness, but rather that people who go unconscious tend to have sustained more severe injuries (more brain damage, more blood loss, etc). 

So, staying awake is correlated with better survival, but not because wakefulness has anything to do with it. More that being unconscious just usually means you're badly injured. 

As far as the airway comments, these also fit into the above model. If you are lightly unconscious, you'll keep your airway, but if you are profoundly unconscious and not arouseable, you'll lose the airway an increase pneumonia risk. But again, profoundly unconscious is associated with greater injury.