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I get the feeling that shutting countries down saved more lives from fatal car accidents than the coronavirus would have ever killed if left open.
by izzydata 6y ago
I 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.