Why I was really hopeful that less Americans had died from Coronavirus in 2020 than car crashes (more have died from Coronavirus)

It’s simple: driving cars is something that we do that is very dangerous but we do because we judge that the risk is worth the potential of reward. It’s incredible, really; the risk is very high and the reward often very low, with alternate means whereby we could obtain it, like driving to pick up some food from the store when we could have biked (if you look at the stats, however, biking is actually more dangerous than driving if you live in a city. A lower total of people die in bike crashes, but more bikers die per bike crash than car drivers die per car crash.) So, I thought, what hypocrites we would be if more people had died from car accidents in the U.S. than Coronavirus. I would love to continue living my life as before the quarantine, so, if more people had died from car crashes, then we should either stop driving cars or stop quarantining. Knowing that people would not stop driving cars, I was excited: finally, an escape from quarantine!

I have not found a count of automobile deaths in America this year, but some simple math shows that it is very unlikely to be more than have died from Coronavirus and that’s assuming that we continued driving as usual. Within the past few years, about 90 people die a day in car accidents. Some large multiple more are handicapped from car accidents each day but let’s ignore that for now. 90 people a day, constant, multiplied by the number of days this year, 95, equals 8,550. Welp, at least 17,000 Americans have died from Coronavirus since its inception. I could be wrong but I imagine people die about a week or two after first symptoms, which occur a few days after infection. So I think it’s safe to say most of those 17,000 deaths occurred this year. I should also say that 17,00 is an underestimate due to our prolonged lack of testing. Simply, the number of deaths from car accidents in the U.S. is not even close to Coronavirus and the number of car-accident deaths is more or less constant at 90 a day, whereas Coronavirus infections increase exponentially, so that the number of deaths from Coronavirus over the next few weeks will outpace car-accident deaths by a mile. Epidemiology is very complex, so it’s hard to say if the trend will continue throughout the summer or over the next year, but the trend doesn’t even have to continue for our quarantine to be more justified than stopping car driving.

So, fellow deviants, even we cannot reasonably justify to ourselves behaving as if there were no virus, not on the basis of an analogy to car accidents. Back to the drawing board.