In a few of my recent conversations with friends, a comparison has come up: Car accidents and COVID-19. The idea behind the comparison has been that motor vehicle transportation can, like COVID-19, kill you. The question associated with the comparison has been how the danger from traveling in a vehicle compares to the danger from, to use a phrase, “living your life” in the face of this pandemic.
According to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration’s data, motor vehicle crash deaths on American roadways totaled 36,560 in 2018, with 1.13 deaths occurring for every 100 million miles traveled. How dangerous is that? Well, it means that if every condition was exactly average all the time—how safe you were driving, how safe your fellow drivers were driving, how safe everyone’s car was, how safe the road itself was, how safe conditions were, etc.—you’d have to drive nearly 900,000 miles to have a one percent chance of dying in a car crash.
Let’s contrast that to other causes of death. The CDC publishes data every year on the leading causes of death in the United States. Of the 2.8 million deaths in America in 2017, roughly 650,000 people died of heart disease, while roughly 600,000 died of cancer (I’m using 2018 for car crashes and 2017 for leading causes of death because they’re the most recent years available for each of these—to clear any questions, neither year’s figures are out of line with those of prior years). Accidents, in total, came in at roughly 170,000 deaths, a number that, if the current pace of deaths hold (and it appears more likely to increase than decrease in the near future, given the trajectory of confirmed cases), will be passed by the coronavirus by the end of September. In context, in which the coronavirus didn’t start killing Americans in large numbers until late March, the coronavirus will have been, in six months, as deadly as all accidents—automotive and otherwise—are in the United States in an average year.
Combine this with the premise that we generally try to avoid accidents, aspiring to drive (and live) in above-average accident-avoiding conditions, and the risk of the coronavirus becomes more clearly significant. The coronavirus is killing somewhere around 500 Americans a day, even with all the precautions currently being taken. Without these precautions, deaths reached a seven-day average as high as roughly 2,000 per day this spring. Automobile accidents kill roughly 100 Americans a day in average circumstances, with average precautions being taken. And yes, all of these numbers vary by how at-risk people are, but just as we take precautions while driving not just for ourselves, but to avoid killing others, the precautions we take with regard to the coronavirus can protect others in addition to ourselves.
The true death rate of the coronavirus is estimated to, in the United States be somewhere between 0.4 and 1.4 percent. Were the true rate a clean 1.0 percent, catching the coronavirus would be, on average, roughly one hundred times more deadly than an average year’s worth of automotive travel for an American, or comparably deadly to 900,000 miles of average automotive travel.
There’s a place for evaluating risk with all this, but the baseline is simple: As it stands, the car accident/coronavirus comparison risks being a false equivalency, depending on its presentation. The current order of magnitude of the deadliness discrepancy is five. Without precautions, it would grow, presumably to twenty or higher. If everyone were to catch the coronavirus over the course of a year, it would be estimated to come in around one hundred.
Remember. To “live your life,” you need to live.
