A hospital stay certainly Chris, but dead is doubtful unless untreated. Lotta bites by this snake in the Southeast, due mostly to it's excellent camouflage coloring, but few deaths. The Eastern Diamondback rattler and Cottonmouth are the ones we get all twitchy about.
A lot of snakes, especially venomous ones, can vary greatly in coloration, but the Copperhead is incredibly consistent, especially with the bands and markings. It's related to the Cottonmouth, but will actually vibrate it's (non-rattling) tail when threatened. Identity crisis I suppose.
My wife was flabbergasted that the other chaperone would make an uninformed assumption that the snake was harmless. If you were herding a group of a dozen 10 year-old Girl Scouts through the forest and stumbled on a snake you couldn't identify, wouldn't you make the opposite assumption for safety's sake? And this on top of a mandatory snake-ID session at the very beginning of the weekend camp. My wife is originally from Minnesota, where venomous snakes are almost non-existant, but she quickly learned her Georgia vipers and - as you pointed out - focuses on the shape of the head more than anything else. The non-venomous Brown Watersnake can look a lot like a Copperhead or Cottonmouth in every particular - even the thicker middle body - but the triangular pit viper head is always the "stay away" giveaway.
