General Discussion
Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsComparing COVID-19 mortality rate to traffic deaths
Whenever I talk about the death rate of COVID-19 being 1% or more, I'm frequently confronted with the response that 35,000 die in traffic accidents each year - as if the COVID deaths are just in the background noise of other causes of death. So what's the big deal?
The big deal is this - 35,000 traffic deaths are minuscule. From the bureau of traffic statistics, Americans take over 400 billion (that's billion, with a "b" car trips per year. The average car trip is 23 miles. Every time you get in a car (as a driver or passenger) start the engine, drive somewhere, and then turn off the engine - that's a "car trip". There's a risk of dying in an accident each time you take a car trip. In fact, there may be multiple opportunities to die within a single "car trip".
Well, 35,000 deaths divided by 400+B car tips is something like 0.00000875% death rate. This is just a little below 1%.
Even if you look at the number of people who travel by car (instead of using car trips as the baseline) that's 95+% of Americans. If that's 310M people, then you're still looking at 35,000 deaths divided by 310M, which is 0.011%. Again, less than 1%.
Source:
https://www.bts.gov/archive/publications/highlights_of_the_2001_national_household_travel_survey/section_02#:~:text=Annually%2C%20the%20total%20number%20of,2001%20was%20nearly%202.3%20trillion.&text=In%20terms%20of%20number%20of,that%20year%20(table%202).
No matter which way you cut it, a 1% death rate on anything is considered high compared to most (if not all) other causes of death.
Beakybird
(3,333 posts)Levity aside, great number crunching.
lame54
(35,317 posts)Bernardo de La Paz
(49,033 posts)35 K versus 448 K in a year at current 3 month rate. But the pandemic is far from over.
PoindexterOglethorpe
(25,894 posts)traffic deaths had been dropping for years.
1969 had the largest number of traffic deaths per 100,000 population, 26.42.
1972 had the largest absolute number of traffic deaths, 54,589.
What changed was a combination of seat belt use, cars themselves being safer, and a lot of public pressure on people not to drink and drive.
Here's a useful chart:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motor_vehicle_fatality_rate_in_U.S._by_year
Buckeye_Democrat
(14,856 posts)... and all of the other problems from getting infected.
This virus isn't something to be trifled with, clearly, despite how many of the the money-obsessed right-wingers are trying to convince us otherwise.
PSPS
(13,614 posts)That's where it breaks down anyway. Even if every business "opened up," it still wouldn't work because the demand won't be there to sustain the business. (Maybe bars will last for a while since their patrons are generally alcoholics and can't help themselves.) But you get the point. People are too afraid, and sensibly so, to flock to businesses now and it will stay that way for some time.
Thomas Hurt
(13,903 posts)hunter
(38,325 posts)Step aside cancer and heart disease.
Deaths and permanent injury attributable to our automobile culture are equally abhorrent.