Comparing COVID-19 mortality rate to traffic deaths [View all]

[SpankMe]

Whenever I talk about the death rate of COVID-19 being 1% or more, I'm frequently confronted with the response that 35,000 die in traffic accidents each year - as if the COVID deaths are just in the background noise of other causes of death. So what's the big deal?

The big deal is this - 35,000 traffic deaths are minuscule. From the bureau of traffic statistics, Americans take over 400 billion (that's billion, with a "b&quot car trips per year. The average car trip is 23 miles. Every time you get in a car (as a driver or passenger) start the engine, drive somewhere, and then turn off the engine - that's a "car trip". There's a risk of dying in an accident each time you take a car trip. In fact, there may be multiple opportunities to die within a single "car trip".

Well, 35,000 deaths divided by 400+B car tips is something like 0.00000875% death rate. This is just a little below 1%.

Even if you look at the number of people who travel by car (instead of using car trips as the baseline) that's 95+% of Americans. If that's 310M people, then you're still looking at 35,000 deaths divided by 310M, which is 0.011%. Again, less than 1%.

Source:

https://www.bts.gov/archive/publications/highlights_of_the_2001_national_household_travel_survey/section_02#:~:text=Annually%2C%20the%20total%20number%20of,2001%20was%20nearly%202.3%20trillion.&text=In%20terms%20of%20number%20of,that%20year%20(table%202).

No matter which way you cut it, a 1% death rate on anything is considered high compared to most (if not all) other causes of death.