User blog comment:DancePowderer/Die, Birdie, Die!/@comment-1940096-20120613043725/@comment-1940096-20120613065637

If you read the manga you can see plenty of times when a character should have died. In fact Oda himself has said he doesn't like to kill characters since he thinks living would be worse than death. You can say with a fact that some characters are dead. For example, Whitebeard or Sabo, but with other characters you can never do it unless it is done in a flashback.