Organ transplants down as stay-at-home rules reduce fatal traffic collisions
npr.org
npr.org
To give a sense of wait time, it varies from region to region. The bay area region is pretty long wait. I think UCSF is 10+ years of wait for a type O blood recipient. In Sacramento area its a 5+ year wait. If you are type AB blood the wait is almost half the time. Some parts of the country the wait times is as short at 1 year.
Although I am somewhat eager for kidney transplant, I also know its not a cure. They might last 10-15 years before you get rejection and have to get another transplant or go back on dialysis. But the anti-rejection medications have slowly improved. Mainly been trying to stay as healthy and stable as possible.
The stay-at-home rules has also been a blessing though because I do home dialysis and that takes a lot of time so not having to travel to work means extra time is available. I even have more time for exercise. My current job has generally been flexible before but I hope more companies will offer remote work after this. Even an extra half hour lost on commute hampers my treatment schedule.
As for why I haven't tried a shorter wait region, I consider transplant as not a cure. It will eventually fail. And there are other things in progress like the UCSF artifical kidney, gene therapy research, better anti-rejection drugs. My hope is when my transplant does fail, one of these alternatives are further along. So I look at each of these things as stepping stones to extend my life.
As for why the region-by-region setup probably because its a big country and patients can't travel from one side to another. Also its difficult to change because any change results is someone having increased wait time. And some of the states don't like to share their organ streams with others. The reality is those states with larger organ pool is because more people die there for whatever reason.
I've also been told that only a small percent of deaths result in viable organs for donation. I think like 2 out of 1000 is what a transplant coordinator told me.
Time is the key here, the more time the organ is not in a living body, the less likely it is to survive transplantation. So if we didn't have regions, and you were living in San Fransisco and a kidney came from a dead biker in Florida, the likelihood of the kidney surviving is less than if that kidney came from Sacramento.
And not all of a donors kidneys are ok two of us got called and only one kidney was viable.
https://abcnews.go.com/Health/Economy/story?id=7902416&page=...
The short answer is you technically can but the ethics are foggy. On the one hand you do help even out the geographical disparity. But you're kind of buying an organ that would have gone to someone else who's probably poorer than you.
Would fix the long waiting list issue.
I basically hooked up at 10 pm for a 8 hour cycle and was done by 6 am and out of the door at 7 to commute.
I would have ben ok doing manual bags but I think having to do so exchanges at work sqicked some cowokers out.
So you were on the list for 4k days? That is like 10 years! Did you already have a transplant?
I also passed on the first before I was on dialysis and passed on the second as it was a "problematic" donor - they where not sure if they where HIV +ve - the Doctors send line was "don't worry we have good drugs for HIV these days"
I just did 2 10l bags in the evening and one filler to tide me over
It maybe the NHS has different criteria for going on the list and it my depend on consultant and the individual - but I had been seeing the nephology team since 2000 ish
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23257790
UPDATE: The other article states "14% jump in fatality rates PER DISTANCE DRIVEN." So the roads are more deadly per mile, but the number of drivers has decreased so much that the overall harm is down.
With proper data sets, all of this should just fall out.
It's signed 25mph. Normal speeds are about 30-35mph. Now, every morning starting about 5:30am, drivers are using it as their own personal drag strip trying to lay down their best 0-60 times.
Police don't really seem to care.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundamental_attribution_error
the opposite--over-attributing to the situation--typically happens to deceive (e.g., shirk responsibility), rather than being an intrinsic bias of our social environment like the fundamental attribution error is.
The roads are safer.
The roads are deadlier.
Both are true and both are false depending upon if you are looking at the total or the per driver (and perhaps even if you are looking at per driver per minute or per driver per mile).
The news is pretty bad in that it's mostly opinions pretending to be facts/information, with occasional data sprinkled in to support their conclusions.
It seems like heavy rush-hour traffic is prone to creating a large number of accidents with a low total number of fatalities. When I drive around now, I believe the risk of accident per mile is significantly lower (city dweller used to typically packed city roads), but due to higher speeds, I can’t make the same claim about lower fatality risk.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lies,_damned_lies,_and_statist...
oh no! why are you getting downvoted?!
ive been banging on about the subjective nature of "facts" on HN for a while now. perhaps a parable from the movie Charlie Wilson's War will help:
A boy is given a horse on his 14th birthday. Everyone in the village says, “Oh how wonderful.” But a Zen master who lives in the village says, “We'll see.” The boy falls off the horse and breaks his foot. Everyone in the village says, “Oh how awful.” The Zen master says, “We'll see.” The village is thrown into war and all the young men have to go to war. But, because of the broken foot, the boy stays behind. Everyone says, “Oh, how wonderful.” The Zen master says, “We'll see.”
Also, do not ignore the opinion, instead look for it specifically, and assume that the data has been curated to support that opinion. Then go find the gaps.
"Stay-at-Home Rules Reduce Fatal Collisions"
Fact. Not opinion. Correct. And important to know, because it's good that fewer people are dying.
"Emptier US roads more lethal"
Likewise a correct fact and not an opinion. And newsworthy because driving right now is more likely to get me killed, and that's something I'd like to know.
And the media got it right, in the headline even. It's posters here that are trying to conflate the two and make them seem like they say opposite things when they clearly did not.
So... which party is the one injecting opinion? It doesn't seem like the media to me. This seems like a bunch of HN commenters trying to spin up a controversy.
> Likewise a correct fact and not an opinion. And newsworthy because driving right now is more likely to get me killed, and that's something I'd like to know.
"lethal" here means more deaths per mile traveled. that might be because roads everywhere are less safe, or it might mean that a greater fraction of total miles are being driven on inherently unsafe stretches of road (with the same local fatality rates as before the crisis). fatalities include pedestrian deaths as well. maybe there is increased risk for pedestrians but not for drivers. the article doesn't say. there's certainly not enough information to say whether you personally are at greater risk driving.
And in any case... I don't understand your criticism at all. If there are more deaths per mile traveled, then every mile driven is on average "more lethal", by definition. So if I drive to the same place I (in the sense of an average "I" across all drivers) am more likely to die. QED.
Basically, you're just criticizing grammar by conflating my use of "I" with me personally and not the abstract reader I clearly intended. Do you make similar quibbles about the abstract use of "you" or "one", or the royal "we"?
> And in any case... I don't understand your criticism at all. If there are more deaths per mile traveled, then every mile driven is on average "more lethal", by definition. So if I drive to the same place I (in the sense of an average "I" across all drivers) am more likely to die. QED.
my criticism is that the average deaths per mile doesn't imply anything about your risk on a typical trip for you. for one thing, the excess deaths could all be pedestrians, and the deaths per mile for drivers could be the same. in particular "So if I drive to the same place I (in the sense of an average "I" across all drivers) am more likely to die." is not implied by the information in the article, because a very possible explanation for the increased rate is that people are not driving to the same places.
let me try to construct a counterexample from my life. in normal times I drive 20 miles each way on the interstate to commute to work. once or twice a week, I drive a mile to the grocery store through a dense urban area. for the sake of the example, let's just assume the interstate has much fewer deaths per mile than city streets do (pretty sure this is true, but don't want to bother looking up a source). I, like many other people, no longer commute to work, but I still buy groceries once or twice a week. so a far greater fraction of my miles are on high-risk stretches of road. the average risk I expose myself to per mile is indeed higher, but this doesn't imply that driving to the grocery store is any more dangerous than it was before. in other words, it is a fact, but not a particularly meaningful one. it shouldn't influence your behavior.
reporting averages without some context or explanation is not very useful and people who aren't familiar with statistics are going to draw all kinds of unsupported conclusions. another random example: I live in a Very Dangerous City if you go by the overall murder rate. but if you dig into where the murders happen, they are tightly clustered in certain areas. I'm no more likely to get shot in my neighborhood than I would be in williamsburg.
It doesn't mean it doesn't either. Someone would need to do the science to show it either way, and that hasn't happened.
I don't see how you get from there (which you could have said in like 5% of the prose as "the variables aren't independent") to your point that the news media shouldn't ever report on scientific results if there is the possibility of a confounded variable.
The standard you want applied would effectively mean that the media can't report on experimental science at all. So I'm going to go back to my original supposition that what you really WANT is for the media not to report on inconvenient facts, and you're hiding behind scientific pedantry to make the case.
There are at least two reasonable readings of that sentence. One is that US roads have more fatal accident risk per mile driven. Another is that the set of US roads is the scene of more total fatalities.
The second one is a more natural reading to me, but presumably not to some others.
Then I don't know which dialect you speak, but that's an outrageously weird interpretation. It's certainly not the way the word "lethal" is defined or interpreted in common usage among the folks I've known.
It's both interesting that traffic deaths are down overall and that deaths are up per mile traveled. But I would argue that they are not anywhere near equally important news. The total lowering of traffic deaths is news. The increase in deaths per mile is an interesting bit of trivia relevant to few people and should be reported as such.
This has been especially bad with something as nuanced and data-driven as COVID. Any new number or stat gets a headline even if it has zero meaning in the grand scheme of things. I've seen news sites with two stories on the same page simultaneously proclaiming that there's no evidence that there is immunity to COVID while also proclaiming that a vaccine trial was successful.
Coincidentally, that's where oldschool print media was better, if only due to space being limited and budgeted. Computers, otoh, are only good at dealing with things that are all alike.
But also because articles were all laid out right there on the pages next to each other and could be compared in physical terms.
Something like "the roads are killing fewer drivers" would be true.
Drivers kill drivers. There are more dangerous drives on the streets with empty roads.
I think we can at least agree that the statement "the roads are safer" is false.
Plenty of places are increased traffic but not bumper to bumper
This is all rounding numbers that have been rounded already to smooth out uniqueness of a given locale
Water is wet level conclusion that using math correctly by math rules to debate a topic that’s locally unique and out of view for people in far flung regions.
My individual odds of dying in an accident haven’t changed much. Safer or worse in some aggregate measure isn’t that useful to me today or tomorrow. Still gonna do as I do.
You could express it in a way that would be correct to all the pedants out there, but it might be a long convoluted sentence.
You can't know which is a better explanation unless you have data with more granularity than is typically provided by the press.
In my experience, there are a lot more pedestrians blindly walking or running across the roads in the past couple months. The drop to nearly zero traffic lulled people into a false sense of security. People are treating every road like a giant sidewalk.
(Not advocating careless jaywalking, just pointing out the car-centric mentality makes me sad)
Genuinely don't think non-highway road crossing needs to be excessively regulated. Human beings will self-organize and the exceptions will not cause significant economic damage. More freedom and less regulation, please.
A better title would have been something like "Traffic fatalities in March drop to ####".
When I was in school, our statistics prof used to put up that daily chart on the bottom of the USA Today front page. He wouldn't start class until we found two or three things wrong with it. By the end of the semester, nobody in the class trusted anything from that newspaper. Great learning experience!
1. https://i.dailymail.co.uk/1s/2020/05/19/18/28584104-8336989-...
People who do not get organs, die in hospitals, not in cars. With that logic person would be a murder, for refusing to "donate" their organs.
Media will publish "The roads are deadlier", or, if they're unusually responsible, nothing.
Remember this when "the news brings you down". They only publish those stories!
Not because they're evil, but because those are the one's we'll click on. Just don't think the news is a representative sample of what happens.
It is quite deadly. But more information is needed to asses risk, e.g. >90% of deaths are to those with preexisting conditions.
So perhaps people are essentially less used to driving, and therefore, more prone to error or less comfortable (which may increase anxiety, or hesitation for in the moment decisions)
The few times I've been out recently, I've definitely noticed that the other drivers on the road do not appear nearly as confident or comfortable.
Just another point of anecdotal data for what it's worth.
There is no / minimal gridlock right now.
However, there is a hidden fatality rate in slow traffic. The number of person-hours wasted waiting for the traffic to move. It can build up to a lifetime pretty easily with enough traffic, so cumulatively the traffic jams in a major metropolitan area can waste the 750,000 hours or so of people's lifetime and virtually kill a person.
In short, commuting sucks.
You would expect freeways to have disproportionally less traffic than other routes due to CORVID precautions.
So really the question is if fatality rates for different road types have changed.
Many offices / train staions don't have secure of street bike parking and I aint going be parking my bike on the street even if its a cheap £400mtb let alone a >£1200 Brompton
I think it has been ticking up in the last few years (in the US).
My temporarily hope is to switch tactics and go more streetsblog.org focusing on pedestrian and cyclist issues. It's not a sustainable policy to exclusively focus on those, but hopefully it's an acceptable lie in the short-term. (Cars being workable is also a lie, so hey, at least not stopping lower than the enemy.)
Bikes are close but only work for short distances in good weather. Add personalized climate control, no strangers in your car, more comfortable seating than any tram, music, and I have no desire to seek alternatives. Only thing I'm left desiring is self-driving so I can use my phone or whatever, the only tangible benefit to transit that appeals to me.
Yeah, they're a bit noisy and worse for the environment and take up space. I see that as part of the price of living in a free society.
This is more true in some areas than others. In a relatively dense city, with well-designed (and, crucially, frequent) transit systems, a whole lot of "where" and "when" you want is going to be more practical with transit, and of course cars can't help you with "how" you want if what you want is not to have to be driving. In many cities, driving my car (or renting a car, if I flew there) would have been tremendously impractical.
It's certainly convenient to have a car sometimes, and there will always be some trips for which your statement is closer to true. And if you choose to live in a place (/cough/ suburbs /cough/) where anything but cars would be impractical, then yes, cars are the only practical option. But it is far, far from the absolute that you make it out to be.
(PS I'm definitely not talking about commuter rail in the US here. Even the "good" lines are terrible by global mass transit standards. They are not "practical" except for a very tightly-constrained set of needs.)
I've driven/been driven in NYC a few times (pre-pandemic) and it wasn't /that/ bad, but I don't think it was ever in Manhattan. Most recently was going to JFK and back from somewhere more upstate.
I looked into transit options and they were seemingly expensive (might have been a wash with crazy bridge tolls down there), had a bunch of connections, and long walking periods or uber connections adding more expense. Definitely didn't sound fun to bring luggage along.
NYC is supposed to be the country's shining example of transit, isn't it? I can't say it enamoured me. If I lived there I'd probably end up biking a lot.
I haven't seen an analysis but I suspect you'll also see a lot of municipal revenue streams cut down when if self-driving cars or other transports become popular. I know a lot of small towns rely on lots of interstate traffic tickets to help balance their budgets. I suspect most those violations will decrease significantly with autonomous transport. I'm not sure how many cities/towns at large are reliant on these sort of revenue streams but I presume increased taxes would need to pickup the bill.
Organ donation at death is entirely risk free to the donor. They have literally nothing to lose from it.
http://thelegalgeeks.com/2014/11/13/stealing-corpses-and-obs...
We are not property of the State therefore, society has no claim on it.
If we are property of the State then all we're disagreeing on is the moment where their claims supersede our own.
The moment of death is a convenient but negotiable/re-definable point: "Well, they're brain dead already.." or "Well, their quality of life.." or "Their chance of survival.."
Or to put it another way: Do you want want [your least favorite politician] writing this policy?
You're trying to force this into a "We {are|aren't} property of the state". Both sound completely wrong to me, on multiple levels. It's a TypeError. You're applying words in ways that don't match.
(You might as well try to convince me that "Beethoven's 5th is either color, or black-and-white". No, those are both wrong. I'm not going to agree with any conclusions you reach starting from either condition.)
Humans aren't "property" (of themselves, or anything else). And the state doesn't own something today just because it may own it after your death (e.g., when a person without a will dies, their house may go to the state, but that in no way means their house was "property of the state" while they were alive, and definitely not that all houses are property of the state).
> Do you want want [your least favorite politician] writing this policy?
Again, that sounds like a fallacy that's trying to goad people into a false choice. I don't want my least favorite politician writing any government policy. There is no framework yet conceived under which a malicious administrator would not be able to cause great harm by instituting a policy of their own design. That doesn't mean all such policies are inherently ill-conceived.
Blood is a funny case because we have a huge never-ending need for fresh blood, and a great number of people (est. 1/3 to 1/2 the population) are eligible to donate, yet very few do. Globally we're so desperate for supply that, even though the WHO has set a goal of 100% non-paid volunteer donors due to safety concerns, we do still have to pay people, and America sells a lot of blood overseas to all those other countries who are too cautious to pay their donors cash outright.
Tons of people are perfectly willing to donate blood. That's not even the problem. In the aftermath of a disaster, blood centers near the disaster area often have so many donors they have to throw some of it away. People are not that afraid of needles, or unwilling to help their fellow humans. They just don't, usually.
Living in my developed country with all of its benefits has costs. I pay taxes to help fund the general welfare, and may be called to serve on a jury, or even go fight in a war. Calling on a few people to give blood doesn't sound too onerous to me.
I don't claim to have the answer, but I think everyone agrees we can do a lot better than what we've got now.
Their donations might just not be accepted.
The willingness is what's important.
NPR is a news organization, not a lobby group.
https://www.organdonation.nhs.uk/uk-laws/organ-donation-law-...
One option I've heard that sounds better is just force people to make a selection when they apply for a drivers license. Current you can opt in, but if you don't do anything you automatically opt out. Instead, just don't accept the form unless they opt in or out. This means the people who would donate but either miss the form or think they'll eventually sign up later (and never get around to it) are signed up.
And, if the ends do justify the means, what about requiring people to be organ donors except for the same exclusions allowed with vaccines? We effectively force vaccines for the greater good and this would be another similar case. Not like the people will miss their organs and as for the family, they won't even know unless you told them as the funeral industry routinely repairing bodies that have gone through far more than an organ donation.
Yes, the ends justify the means. It's, like, one of the foremost global examples of an ends-justify-means cost-benefit change we could make to improve lives.
It's not clear to me why that would apply to the earlier comment, but not to yours. Unless it's because of the part I left out about them not feeling strongly enough about ticking a box, but then I don't see what the problem is with the original suggestion of making that box-ticking obligatory.
Just switching to opt-in by default has none of these problems, so that's why I support opt-in-by-default but not mandatory donation. It's not inconsistent .
Doesn't opt-out also hurt people while they are alive, who are now pressured to remain vigilant about having to make sure they're not missing any forms, or their forms not being processed correctly, etc., spending their life feeling a lack of control where a single misstep results in disrespecting their after-death wishes?
And again, what's the problem with making the box-ticking obligatory e.g. when picking up a driver's licence, rather than making it opt-out?
Opt-in-by-default does have the disadvantage you mentioned, but I don't think it carries much weight. Society could solve this problem just by sending a certificate/card to people who opt-out to tell both them and medical practitioners of their choice.
> And, if the ends do justify the means, what about requiring people to be organ donors except for the same exclusions allowed with vaccines?
I'm fine with this.
Assuming you are a proponent of opt-out organ donation: Should then bodies be taken as needed for scientific research?
Yes, in that case they would normally try to give it to my heirs first, but my heirs have no right of ownership of my organs.
Yes.
That ER doc you're talking about has spent their entire life working their fingers to the bone to help others. They are beyond committed and passionate about saving every possible life, even when it's detrimental to their own health.
To suggest they might not work hard to save someone right in front of them is insulting and horrible.
A simple web search for "surgeon charged with" will reveal that sometimes surgeons do things they shouldn't, just like members of any other profession. How do you square "They are beyond committed and passionate" with surgeons who rape their patients, or knowingly perform unnecessary surgeries out of greed? You can't.
Look at even the mental health profession, where in all cases Doctors are supposed to be 'helping others'. And yet I know that I could never see my housemate's doctor and get the same set of meds that I get seeing mine.
We both have very similar conditions, and yet the life outcomes are vastly different in that change in meds. Yet housemate's doc insists they are doing the 'morally right' thing.
Edit: FWIW, my interactions with Doctors and Pre-med students outside of the actual medical profesison and the stories I've heard do nothing to help my assessment.
Counter-argument in the form of a question: does one life matter as much as (or more than) three or four that might be saved from that one life's organs? Especially if the one that's clinging to life might've ended up in that position as a consequence of their own actions, such as by way of an at-fault car crash?
I'd argue that the doctor's responsibility is to save any life presented to them regardless of how, but I won't put it past anyone to do the calculus above.
(this may appear to meet the textbook definition of a strawman argument, but I'd venture that this is--by virtue of how many organs can come from one person--a real enough possibility to warrant consideration)
Coming back to the calculus performed: if the odds of survival are much less than certain, what's the point at which a doctor, thinking algorithmically rather than with a mission, decides that there's more value in lives saved from a patient's organs than in trying to save the primary patient and potentially losing organ viability (or just time) if the mission fails?
I'm pretty certain the vast majority of doctors will obey the Hippocratic Oath as intended. I'm also somewhat certain that a minority subset of doctors will interpret the Oath differently than others, and this is the most impossible assertion to falsify because very few surgeons/teams will admit this short of a certifiably anonymous survey... if that.
Wales switched to opt out a few years ago and the rest of the UK is changing now.
The real issues of perverse incentives having a significant impact has to do more with for-profit companies that participate in the market for body parts and the state of interdependence that now exists with our understaffed medical examiners. There are far more cases of aggressive organ harvesting interfering with criminal investigations than ER doctors letting people die to collect the organs.
I know you want to stop wasting valuable organs from dead people that could go to help living people - and I do too! I just don't want people to lose agency over their own lives and body parts.
Then there are the wicked, amoral, heartless people - like me - who think people should be free to sell their organs if they want to. I would personally sell any of my organs (after I'm dead) for $1 each. But as a form of protest against the current system, I won't ever willingly donate them.
I hope you'll reconsider.
If organ selling is legalized, poor people will be coerced by force or by money. And they may not realize the full health implications of that until much later, where they have no recourse.
As a society, we generally try to prevent people from entering such unfair contracts, e.g, you can't agree to become a slave, or establishing ceiling on interest rates to limit predatory lending. People willing to sell their organs are probably desperate enough to agree to anything, and saving them is worthwhile.
The act of creating a market for organs is intrinsically morally repugnant.
Money are just an tool used by humanity, not the other way around.
Anyways with an opt out system the market for 'sold' organs would probably be non-existent.
It might occur to you that your childish ideas about "sticking it to the man" is ignorant horseshit.
>I hope you'll reconsider.
Yeah well, I hope you'll reconsider too.
This is all basically a "greater good" argument end of the day that you either agree that if your body can be used to help others then it should be or the alternative is you are a selfish ass. There is honestly no inbetween here.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/27/business/economy/27view.h...
So much of what we do is inertial, normalized insanity that bears some introspection.
For example, it's interesting to hear so many people talk about how they miss shopping. I'm the same way, and it made me think ... wait a minute, I've saved more money in the past two months than I have in years, I don't feel like I'm missing any tangible goods ... maybe rampant consumerism is, in aggregate, bad for me?
Same with dining out, which I did with incredible frequency.
All of this makes me think not just about my behavior, but the massive drivers behind making us all want to spend money on things we don't need in the pursuit of manufactured pleasure.
https://twitter.com/nkozyra/status/1263106625335734273
It's a weird statement on where modern startup/retail is.
In other words, my issue isn't with the mechanics of capitalism.
These are customized. I mean, if this were the only company selling facemasks, sure, $15 is a lot. But for somebody who wants to jazz up their facemask, maybe $15 makes sense. I'm not interested in that but maybe somebody is.
If burgers were a thing people could use in a pandemic to reduce transmission and they let affiliates put a design on the bun and upcharge to get a sliver of profit I think this might be a fair analog.
I dunno, I think this is a missed opportunity for some good pr, or at least not look like they're exploiting a crisis even further.
I did see the other day Chipolte is doing their own delivery service now which is awesome. Not sure why more places ditch Grubhub and Doordash and just have their own in house delivery service. It's so much cheaper than outsourcing to companies who've been gouging restaurants and the consumer.
Basically contract delivery services have a premium to begin with, to take the delivery business off your hands. If you have dramatically more orders per day, it can actually make sense to have your own delivery people; especially since your managers have all the time in the world to focus on delivery now that your dine-in is closed or restricted.
I may be the only person in my apartment complex ordering Chipotle for dinner tonight, but there are going to be several others ordering something.
Now, unlikely and difficult don't mean impossible but there's more to it than meets the eye.
Instead, it's a platform that incentivizes affiliates to markup face masks. Like, there's no value add here.
It's interesting to think about what long term effects this will have on shopping, particularly retail stores long term. This was a good piece on it: https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-coronavirus-bull-market-for-g... This will definitely impact the way people interact/eat in NYC.
Reminds me of something I recently learned about the word ‘apocalypse’ which is the greek word meaning ‘revelation’ (e.g. book of revelation).
A revelation is an unveiling or unfolding of things not previously known _and_ which could not have been known apart from the unfolding events.
Ergo, this event is an apocalypse (of sorts :))
The bigger issue is buried in the middle of the article: we lost out on possible transplants because of lack of COVID-19 tests. There's no upside to that.
I remember talking with some ex-colleague of mine some 3 months ago, just before the pandemic hit us (where I live, that is) - we were talking about how this would impact business, and to my big surprise he was very cool about the situation. I had to remind him that he (working in marketing, living in a tourist city) was only approximately two edges away from the businesses most in danger of getting pummeled by the virus.
But, no, it was only "hysteria". Lo and behold, 6 weeks later he's temporarily laid off, because the businesses he's making ads for are closing down, because they again were supplying stuff to the travel industry, among others.
And we're going to see a lot more of that, in the upcoming months. The reach is wide, and the aftershock is long.
"Organs-for-compensation"
I've definitely noticed a lot more bad drivers on the road recently. I think I've hit my dashcam button more times in the last month than I have in all the years combined.
Wendover also just did a pretty nice video on risk (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NtX-Ibi21tU).
Really shows how incredibly dangerous our automobile oriented transportation system is, and how effective removing cars from the road can be.
There is a lot of medical debate on how to do implants / transplants safely in the current climate.
Meanwhile in Russia, approx. 3000 people are reported to die of corona in 5 months. In 2019, 16'900 died in road accidents. That gives approx. 7000 in 5 months. Which is twice as many, but I can't remember anyone locking down the roads, scanning QR codes in order to unlock the car or zealously repeating the NEW NORMAL, THE WORLD HAVE CHANGED mantra out of every hole. Heck, neither can I remember anyone constructing concrete barriers instead of purely nominal double center lines between adjacent opposite lanes where possible!
Its cute to deliberately conflate dissimilar things. Corona is different among mortality statistics in that, everybody can be at risk if we're not careful.
Well if nobody subscribes for death, why are people still mortal?
https://www.who.int/classifications/icd/covid19/en/
"U07.2 COVID-19, virus not identified" changes to "U07.1 COVID-19, virus identified" presumably when the test results come back. Probable cases versus confirmed cases.
It's not magic, it's pretty obvious.
Can't you stupid flagging fucks tolerate these words even when used as sarcasm?
All that aside: road accident deaths aren't contagious. They happen and they are done. There is no possibility of [exponential] community spread, I don't have to worry about infecting my grandmother, your grandmother via you, or the immuno-compromised children my wife cares for in the hospital.
My grandfather died of electrocution in 1996. Would he be still alive today, given that he was born in 1927, if he would meticulously scrutinize every millimeter of electric cords he ever touched for potential cracks?
Yesterday I got a great deal with a loan shark. He gave me $10 at 540×10¹⁴% annual interest. Everyone is acting like this is a big mistake, but today I only owe him $11. Why all the fuss?
You can read more here: https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2020/05/covid-19-death-toll-m...
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.
I think the biggest safety increse from transportation autonomy, whatever its form, we are already seeing with Uber et al. Those who would rather not drive, don't have to.
The OPO stuff etc. is obviously an American thing but I'm pretty sure no transplant surgeon in the world works for free.
Can’t tell if this is satire complaining that you won’t make money after death.
Other things that also act to make 'me' money after death: my wealth, my copyrighted property, my land. No one expects me to give that away for free even though many would benefit. So no, I won't be giving away my body either.
> "When we see the combination of both a dramatic decrease in number of total deaths coupled with a dramatic increase in the fatality rate on our roads that was very surprising," Kolosh said.
It sounds like both articles agree that the number of total deaths over a period of time is lower, despite the increase in deaths per miles driven.