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Organ transplants down as stay-at-home rules reduce fatal traffic collisions
- teslademigod1 6y agoThe unintended consequences of covid-19 (both good and bad) are really surprising.
- nkozyra 6y agoI think the best part it is that we're stopping to think about our behavior in general. So much of what we do is inertial, normalized insanity that bears some introspection. For example, it's interesting to hear so many people talk about how they miss shopping. I'm the same way, and it made me think ... wait a minute, I've saved more money in the past two months than I have in years, I don't feel like I'm missing any tangible goods ... maybe rampant consumerism is, in aggregate, bad for me? Same with dining out, which I did with incredible frequency. All of this makes me think not just about my behavior, but the massive drivers behind making us all want to spend money on things we don't need in the pursuit of manufactured pleasure.
- nkozyra 6y agoIf I may tack on one other observation, it's the sad attempts by companies to try to profit from the pandemic while looking altruistic: https://twitter.com/nkozyra/status/1263106625335734273 https://twitter.com/nkozyra/status/1263106625335734273 It's a weird statement on where modern startup/retail is.
- LargeWu 6y agoI don't know, what are companies supposed to do, not sell facemasks? That doesn't help either.
- nkozyra 6y agoIt's not that they're [selling facemasks] they're doing so at incredible markup, encouraging and incentivizing sellers to create even more markup.
- pc86 6y agoThat's not how economics works.
- nkozyra 6y agoIf I were complaining about price gouging in a hurricane and you came strolling around and told me "hey, that's how economics works" I'd say you missed the point entirely. In other words, my issue isn't with the mechanics of capitalism.
- LargeWu 6y agoShould we also be condemning our local gastropub for charging $15 for a burger? Shouldn't they be charging the same as White Castle? People gotta eat after all. These are customized. I mean, if this were the only company selling facemasks, sure, $15 is a lot. But for somebody who wants to jazz up their facemask, maybe $15 makes sense. I'm not interested in that but maybe somebody is.
- nkozyra 6y ago$15 is the starting price, affiliates can charge what they like. If burgers were a thing people could use in a pandemic to reduce transmission and they let affiliates put a design on the bun and upcharge to get a sliver of profit I think this might be a fair analog. I dunno, I think this is a missed opportunity for some good pr, or at least not look like they're exploiting a crisis even further.
- LargeWu 6y agoBut, again, it's not like this is the only company selling masks. It's not price gouging if there are tons of lower cost alternatives. They're offering an upgraded experience, some people are going to want that, and that's ok.
- at-fates-hands 6y agoThere's been a lot of press about delivery services gouging restaurants now that a majority of them are being forced to use them. I did see the other day Chipolte is doing their own delivery service now which is awesome. Not sure why more places ditch Grubhub and Doordash and just have their own in house delivery service. It's so much cheaper than outsourcing to companies who've been gouging restaurants and the consumer.
- microcolonel 6y agoThere will be an equilibrium between these things, and it's not necessarily just “gouging” if delivery services increase prices, given that the actual supply of drivers (as has been reported here before) is strained. Basically contract delivery services have a premium to begin with, to take the delivery business off your hands. If you have dramatically more orders per day, it can actually make sense to have your own delivery people; especially since your managers have all the time in the world to focus on delivery now that your dine-in is closed or restricted.
- daveFNbuck 6y agoEven if you have a high order volume, a delivery service should still have more deliveries near a given destination and be able to improve margins by grouping those together for delivery. I may be the only person in my apartment complex ordering Chipotle for dinner tonight, but there are going to be several others ordering something.
- microcolonel 6y agoThat is a common assumption for people to make about delivery services, but it is not that correct with prepared food delivery, where it is unlikely that you will line up even two pickups without compromising the freshness/hotness of at least one of the orders; often this is difficult even if both of the pickups are from the same establishment. Now, unlikely and difficult don't mean impossible but there's more to it than meets the eye.
- 6y ago
- pc86 6y agoThere are tons of examples of this (my local car dealership is running a deal on getting your car detailed right now). It seems odd that you picked probably the least egregious example possible, a company selling face masks.
- nkozyra 6y agoAgain, it's not a company selling face masks. If they did that, just said "here's our face masks for sale" it would be great. Instead, it's a platform that incentivizes affiliates to markup face masks. Like, there's no value add here.
- griffinkelly 6y agoI've been getting all my retail therapy out at the grocery store. It's interesting to think about what long term effects this will have on shopping, particularly retail stores long term. This was a good piece on it: https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-coronavirus-bull-market-for-groceries-11585937507 https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-coronavirus-bull-market-for-g... This will definitely impact the way people interact/eat in NYC.
- mensetmanusman 6y agoLove this. Reminds me of something I recently learned about the word ‘apocalypse’ which is the greek word meaning ‘revelation’ (e.g. book of revelation). A revelation is an unveiling or unfolding of things not previously known _and_ which could not have been known apart from the unfolding events. Ergo, this event is an apocalypse (of sorts :))
- rb808 6y agoI've put on weight, lost a lot of fitness and strength, the stress is taking a mental toll and I skipped a cancer screening test. Its really affecting my health and I'm nowhere near the virus.
- russdill 6y agoAnd provide a lot of real world data for things that would move the same levers.
- ken 6y agoIt's a shame for the people who need transplants, but reducing accidents is overall an improvement. Fewer people are dying overall. If we were approaching this from the opposite direction, nobody would suggest that increasing the number of cars on the road would be good because it would increase the pool of organ donors. The bigger issue is buried in the middle of the article: we lost out on possible transplants because of lack of COVID-19 tests. There's no upside to that.
- TrackerFF 6y agoIt's a good lesson for those that naively think the world is (largely) uncoupled, where you can shut down / remove one part, and nothing around it is affected. I remember talking with some ex-colleague of mine some 3 months ago, just before the pandemic hit us (where I live, that is) - we were talking about how this would impact business, and to my big surprise he was very cool about the situation. I had to remind him that he (working in marketing, living in a tourist city) was only approximately two edges away from the businesses most in danger of getting pummeled by the virus. But, no, it was only "hysteria". Lo and behold, 6 weeks later he's temporarily laid off, because the businesses he's making ads for are closing down, because they again were supplying stuff to the travel industry, among others. And we're going to see a lot more of that, in the upcoming months. The reach is wide, and the aftershock is long.
- asdff 6y agoAnd these same people think they will just be hired right away and things will spool right back up. With nearly 40 million people claiming unemployment. Things that took years to build crumbled in weeks. It will take years again.
- mensetmanusman 6y agoI wonder about the alternative timeline scenario where America didn’t have such high levels of the pre-existing conditions that make covid deadly (>98% of covid deaths in MA are due to/with preexisting conditions).
- deweller 6y agoBut another article on HN says "Emptier US roads more lethal in coronavirus pandemic, report says (bbc.com)" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23257790 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23257790 UPDATE: The other article states "14% jump in fatality rates PER DISTANCE DRIVEN." So the roads are more deadly per mile, but the number of drivers has decreased so much that the overall harm is down.
- leetcrew 6y agofatalities per mile can go up while having a much lower absolute number of fatalities.
- whafro 6y agoBoth can be true – roads can be more lethal on a per-mile-traveled (or per-minute traveled) basis, but with many fewer miles/minutes traveled overall, total cumulative fatalities are down. That seems to be the case in these articles.
- microcolonel 6y agoAlso it's possible that local travel restrictions have shown that per-mile injury and fatality rates are biased by trip distance.
- Mirioron 6y agoThis sounds like it's in line with the theory of risk homeostasis or at least the Peltzmann effect.[0] The theory states that as people feel safer they will take riskier actions. In this case the roads are emptier so people feel that they can drive faster, which leads to more accidents. Note that the theory does not have much support, but there seems to be some kind of an effect like this. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Risk_compensation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Risk_compensation
- piinbinary 6y agoI wonder if that could be due to a mix-shift in who is driving (perhaps the safest drivers are disproportionately spending less time driving compared to the less safe drivers)
- ciceryadam 6y agoAnother NPR article states March fatality rates spiked by 14% - https://www.npr.org/sections/coronavirus-live-updates/2020/05/20/859829779/as-states-locked-down-in-march-motor-vehicle-fatality-rate-spiked-by-14 https://www.npr.org/sections/coronavirus-live-updates/2020/0...
- david422 6y agoBoth written March 20th.
- orisho 6y agoFatality rates are up, but overall fatality count is down as less people are on the road.
- shadowgovt 6y agoYep. Rates (per mile driven) up, total drivers (and therefore fatalities) down.
- neogodless 6y ago> motor vehicle fatalities per miles driven increased by 14% compared to the March 2019 rate > "When we see the combination of both a dramatic decrease in number of total deaths coupled with a dramatic increase in the fatality rate on our roads that was very surprising," Kolosh said. It sounds like both articles agree that the number of total deaths over a period of time is lower, despite the increase in deaths per miles driven.
- jseliger 6y agoIf people really thought about the number of people killed and maimed in car crashes, I wonder if we'd see greater support for alternative transportation. https://jakeseliger.com/2019/12/16/maybe-cars-are-just-really-bad-but-theyre-normal-so-we-dont-pay-attention-to-how-bad/ https://jakeseliger.com/2019/12/16/maybe-cars-are-just-reall...
- Invictus0 6y agoThe flip side of this would be to say that auto fatalities are fairly low and steadily decreasing, with a fatality rate of 1.25 per 100 million miles driven. For reference, that's 10% greater than the distance between the Earth and the Sun.
- zip1234 6y agoCars are noisy and take up a ton of space. In cities bikes seem like a way better way to go, especially with e-bikes. They are quieter, safer, smaller, and healthier. Auto fatalities are only low compared to previous years of auto fatalities. Also, electric cars are still noisy. Tire noise at 35 mph is the same on both electric and IC cars.
- C1sc0cat 6y agoFor some short journeys in good weather - yes but as the rate of bike theft is massively more than car theft Many offices / train staions don't have secure of street bike parking and I aint going be parking my bike on the street even if its a cheap £400mtb let alone a >£1200 Brompton
- flaque 6y agoBike theft and lack of bike parking seem like wildly cheaper and easier to solve problems than the mass of traffic infrastructure problems needed solved for cars.
- jschwartzi 6y agoBike theft is huge because the cops don't do anything about it.
- trixie_ 6y agoNot one mention in the article about changing the organ donation system to be opt-out. That is such a wasted opportunity given the huge reach of NPR.
- psychometry 6y agoIt absolutely should be opt-out. I also think that if you choose to opt out, you should not be eligible to receive donated organs.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- ghastmaster 6y agoDo you feel the same way about blood donation/transfusion?
- cjbprime 6y agoThat's a trickier case in that giving blood is at least an inconvenience while you're still alive to experience it..
- ghastmaster 6y agoThe argument is fundamentally the same. The benefit outweighs the cost by a large margin. There are social and psychological reasons for not donating organs after death that apply to blood donation as well.
- ceejayoz 6y agoGiving blood is low risk, but not risk free. Organ donation at death is entirely risk free to the donor. They have literally nothing to lose from it.
- 6y ago
- goda90 6y agoThis has also been discussed as a consequence of every car becoming fully autonomous someday. Crashes will be way down. We need to keep making progress on lab grown organs.
- cromka 6y agoI think that simply switching to opt-out would be enough to meet the demand.
- altgeek 6y agoThis is an old article, but cogently written: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2322914/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2322914/ "Organs-for-compensation"
- dawnerd 6y agoWow I read that headline wrong. I read it as 'Oregon Transplants..." and was wondering what reduced collisions had to do with people moving into state. I've definitely noticed a lot more bad drivers on the road recently. I think I've hit my dashcam button more times in the last month than I have in all the years combined. Wendover also just did a pretty nice video on risk (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NtX-Ibi21tU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NtX-Ibi21tU).
- 7leafer 6y agoElectrocutions, banana-slipping, fork-stabbing and ladder-falling down as forced self-imprisonment into madhouse soft-rooms reduces stupid domestic accidents. Meanwhile in Russia, approx. 3000 people are reported to die of corona in 5 months. In 2019, 16'900 died in road accidents. That gives approx. 7000 in 5 months. Which is twice as many, but I can't remember anyone locking down the roads, scanning QR codes in order to unlock the car or zealously repeating the NEW NORMAL, THE WORLD HAVE CHANGED mantra out of every hole. Heck, neither can I remember anyone constructing concrete barriers instead of purely nominal double center lines between adjacent opposite lanes where possible!
- JoeAltmaier 6y agoBut are traffic accidents contagious? We're at 10% infection now. What will 50% look like? Its cute to deliberately conflate dissimilar things. Corona is different among mortality statistics in that, everybody can be at risk if we're not careful.
- 7leafer 6y agoBut do you subscribe for an accident or a non-contagious disease at some kind of Public Terminal of Fate? 3000 dying of tuberculosis every day, did they subscribe for such a death? Well if nobody subscribes for death, why are people still mortal?
- 7leafer 6y agoA relative of mine works at the central hospital in my city. She's been seeing with her very eyes that the department of infections is empty since the circus began. People with infections other than corona are sent home to cope or die, because empty beds are reserved for corona. Explain, please. And also explain by what magic the U07.2 in death certificates is transmuting into U07.1 for the news and statistics. If you don't know what that means, lookup the WHO's disease IDs.
- ceejayoz 6y ago> And also explain by what magic the U07.2 in death certificates is transmuting into U07.1 for the news and statistics. https://www.who.int/classifications/icd/covid19/en/ https://www.who.int/classifications/icd/covid19/en/ "U07.2 COVID-19, virus not identified" changes to "U07.1 COVID-19, virus identified" presumably when the test results come back. Probable cases versus confirmed cases. It's not magic, it's pretty obvious.
- geerlingguy 6y agoFor some reason I keep reading this as "the number of people who move to Oregon is decreasing", and my brain can't draw any connection between that and traffic collisions. Maybe it's the HN bubble around news focused in tech hubs on the West coast.
- izzydata 6y agoI get the feeling that shutting countries down saved more lives from fatal car accidents than the coronavirus would have ever killed if left open.
- foxyv 6y agoIn the USA there are usually around 35-40k traffic fatalities per year. COVID19 even with the lockdowns has killed around 95k. With the release of restrictions, soon there will be more.
- izzydata 6y agoWHO claims that 1.35 million people die per year across the whole world in car accidents.
- foxyv 6y agoAt the current count of a minimum of 354,000 deaths, we would have to mitigate 26% of traffic deaths world wide for the entire year before it would make up for the fatalities caused by COVID19. So far it appears that traffic fatalities haven't decreased that much during the lockdown. In California, where we have good figures for this sort of thing, there has only been an 8% decrease in fatal accidents for the first 3 months of 2020 despite an 18.6% drop in number of miles driven. Unfortunately it doesn't seem that the decrease in traffic fatalities will offset more than a fraction of the deaths due to COVID19. Especially considering that the death toll is projected to easily exceed 1 million worldwide.
- bagacrap 6y agoyou are right in a certain sense. The point of lockdown was to avoid triage deaths, ie deaths from a lack of hospital capacity. We have not had an issue with running out of capacity so it looks like we could have kept triage deaths to zero even with basic preventative measures like masks. On the other hand we are actually saving lives due to reduced traffic, because of lockdown.
- pkaye 6y agoI'm in kidney failure and on dialysis. Also on the kidney transplant list and was expecting this would happen pretty early on. The stopping and slowing down of procedures plus the reduction of donor organs. It could easily add an extra year into the wait time. I myself havet 1+ year in the wait list but that will probably extend to 2+ years. To give a sense of wait time, it varies from region to region. The bay area region is pretty long wait. I think UCSF is 10+ years of wait for a type O blood recipient. In Sacramento area its a 5+ year wait. If you are type AB blood the wait is almost half the time. Some parts of the country the wait times is as short at 1 year. Although I am somewhat eager for kidney transplant, I also know its not a cure. They might last 10-15 years before you get rejection and have to get another transplant or go back on dialysis. But the anti-rejection medications have slowly improved. Mainly been trying to stay as healthy and stable as possible. The stay-at-home rules has also been a blessing though because I do home dialysis and that takes a lot of time so not having to travel to work means extra time is available. I even have more time for exercise. My current job has generally been flexible before but I hope more companies will offer remote work after this. Even an extra half hour lost on commute hampers my treatment schedule.
- jabits 6y agoThanks for your story, and good luck. I will be joining your plight in a few years...
- ummonk 6y agoHow does this work? Is it possible to move and get on a different waitlist? It's hard for me to see why they would setup region-by-region waitlists. Fingers crossed for you.
- joncrane 6y agoThis is my question, too. Surely there are flexible people who move to the area with the shortest waitlist.
- pkaye 6y agoYes like I mentioned in other reply, you can move regions and carry your wait list time. But many people are tied by job and family. Also insurance plans sometimes have preferred hospitals. As for why I haven't tried a shorter wait region, I consider transplant as not a cure. It will eventually fail. And there are other things in progress like the UCSF artifical kidney, gene therapy research, better anti-rejection drugs. My hope is when my transplant does fail, one of these alternatives are further along. So I look at each of these things as stepping stones to extend my life.
- baggy_trough 6y agoIt's unfortunate that donors cannot be compensated for their surplus kidney. The restriction is essentially equivalent to the government murdering large numbers of its citizens.
- recursive 6y ago> The restriction is essentially equivalent to the government murdering large numbers of its citizens. Removing the restriction would be equivalent to the government murdering large numbers of different citizens.
- baggy_trough 6y agoOnly if you consider the government responsible for the choices people make, which I do not.
- recursive 6y ago> Only if you consider the government responsible for the choices people make, which I do not. But you are holding the government responsible for the choices people make. The choice not to donate (presumably) without compensation.
- baggy_trough 6y agoNot at all. I'm holding the government responsible for its action to remove (make illegal) a choice.
- recursive 6y agoDo you think it's ever ok for anything to be illegal? Every illegal thing represents the removal of a choice to do that thing.
- baggy_trough 6y ago
- dang 6y agoRelated from yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23251909 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23251909 ("Organ donation in England has moved to an opt-out system").
- suprgeek 6y agoThis was somewhat predictable. I will be really interested in another piece of data. When we re-open fully (whatever that means) and people get back on the roads perhaps even more than they used to will it reset the waiting times because of excess collisions and more fatalities?
- Tiktaalik 6y agoSaw a stat from ICBC the public insurance auto insurer in British Columbia. There's usually around 15,000 "accidents" (let's call them car crashes folks) a week in the province. With Covid, numbers are down 60% some weeks to ~9000. Really shows how incredibly dangerous our automobile oriented transportation system is, and how effective removing cars from the road can be.
- renewiltord 6y agoI am not an organ donor. The reason is simple: Everyone in a transplant chain (Organ Procurement Orgs, Hospitals, Transplant Surgeons) makes money off a transplant except the guy giving up his organs. The rules for me are clear: I have a simple price on each of my organs should I be brain dead. Pay the price to me, and it will go to my beneficiaries in my notarized will, and you can hollow me out if I'm brain dead. Don't and I take them with me.
- liotier 6y agoAre you an American ?
- renewiltord 6y agoI'm not American, but I did move to the USA because I liked American principles, culture, and money so take from that what you will. The OPO stuff etc. is obviously an American thing but I'm pretty sure no transplant surgeon in the world works for free.
- sokoloff 6y agoWhy should they work for free?! It's a skilled profession, doing good in the world for people who need it.
- renewiltord 6y agoThat's right. They needn't. And I'm not going to let go of my organs for free either. I'm comfortable with that outcome.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- mensetmanusman 6y agoLol, Can’t tell if this is satire complaining that you won’t make money after death.
- kgin 6y agoAs autonomy in cars becomes more common, organ transplants and small towns that run on speeding ticket income will have to find new solutions.
- anewdirection 6y agoYou are making a lot of unfounded assumptions in tht statement. As far as we can tell, 'self-driving' cars are no safer in real-world conditions any more than a trained driver is. I think the biggest safety increse from transportation autonomy, whatever its form, we are already seeing with Uber et al. Those who would rather not drive, don't have to.
- walshemj 6y agoAlso some what misses the fact that a lot of transplant centres stopped implanting patients due to covid-19, There is a lot of medical debate on how to do implants / transplants safely in the current climate.
- iancmceachern 6y agoNeed more LVADs