We must continue social distancing, and yes, I’m using car crash data to prove it
So President Donald Trump tweeted out Monday - in all caps, because that’s what normal, wellreasoned people do - “WE CANNOT LET THE CURE BE WORSE THAN THE PROBLEM ITSELF. AT THE END OF THE 15 DAY PERIOD, WE WILL MAKE A DECISION AS TO WHICH WAY WE WANT TO GO!”
And you know what I thought? I thought that we need to build safer cars. Did you know - I didn’t - but did you know one in 106 deaths in America each year are motor vehicle related? What that means, to be precise, is that for every 106 people that die each year in America, one of those deaths is because of a car accident.
Which means you, me, and the mailman all have a .095 percent chance of meeting our maker while making a left hand turn.
Now think back to all the fender-benders, bigger accidents, near-misses, and “holy futzing shizz I almost died!” moments you’ve had in a car over the years.
Now think of all the ones you’re bound to have going forward.
Now compress them all into a year-long period.
That’s more or less - in a worst case scenario, as sketched out by the CDC - the chances someone has of dying from the coronavirus, assuming factors too numerous to mention but for sake of today’s argument, let’s just side with the CDC, as no one, as yet, really knows what the true death rate is for the coronavirus due to both testing shortages and the fact not everyone is being tested.
By the way, I write this as a positive thing, although so far I can understand how you might see otherwise.
Basically, I do not freak out every single time I get behind the wheel. I understand math, and thus understand that I don’t have a near-1 percent chance of dying every time I hit the road; it’s over the course of a lifetime where that number comes into play.
And so it should be heartening to know that in the CDC’s worst case scenario - a world where we stop social distancing, and just carry on like normal - the overall death rate will be around that same 1 percent.
But the difference - the big, huge, major, no comparison difference - is time.
We accept the car death odds because it’s stretched over a natural lifetime.
We cannot accept the coronavirus odds because they’re stretched over 12-18 months, or whenever a vaccine or treatment is discovered.
And that is why - without question, without second thought we need to continue what we’ve started when it comes to trying to tamp down this disease. We need to social distance to - yep - flatten the curve. We need to make sure we don’t make the same mistakes as Italy or Spain or Wuhan. We need to make sure we don’t overwhelm hospitals. We need to make sure we have enough beds and ventilators. We need to make sure our death rate doesn’t skyrocket because we don’t have enough places to treat the sick.
Yes, it’s going to hurt. Yes, the economy will suffer. Yes, we’re all going to have to sacrifice.
But ripping off the Band-Aid as Trump indicated he’d like to do with that ALL CAPS tweet would be like driving 100MPH every single time you got behind the wheel. Sure, you might make it out alive, but you’re going to dramatically up your chances of killing yourself - and countless others in the process.