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Comment by bmeski | Hacker News Reader

Yes.

How many people die in car accidents each year?

Will it increase exponentially if not cared about?

Yes, car deaths have decreased by multiple orders of magnitude in the US: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motor_vehicle_fatality_rate_in...

You can’t infer that from the graph. Yeah, they will go back to pre-pandemic levels, but they won’t increase exponentially from then on - which is not the case for COVID with no restrictions, which will only plateau at ridiculously high amount of infected (and dead).

> COVID with no restrictions, which will only plateau at ridiculously high amount of infected (and dead).

I'm curious what you think of Florida, which has had almost no restrictions for a majority of the pandemic and yet is actually doing better than some other states. Seems to disprove your assertion?

Airborne transmission being heavily climate-dependent? We can’t make everything into Florida (and that would be a much bigger problem than any virus in itself :D)

I'd imagine we'd have studies on this by now if that were actually the case though, right? It's been almost 2 years... so it seems like there's something else going on.

No, the fatality rate has. Unhappily, every safety advance seems to lead to an increase in crashes IIRC. Which sounds about like how we in the US approach COVID too.

Of course. Most deaths prevented by strong safety laws.

An order of magnitude less than the covid deaths in a year. And yet automobile engineering and usage are heavily regulated in order to improve safety and reduce fatalities.

In Sweden? ~300 [1], so about 40 years worth of traffic accidents.

[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/438009/number-of-road-de...

And that's why I'm unironically for banning cars in the long term. They're a terrible mode of transport, trains and bikes are all we need.

Hmmm, I take it you live in a city? You may not need anything other than a train or bike but other people have different needs.

So I actually live in a small town of 800 people somewhere in Europe. I can take the train if i need to get anywhere further than is comfortable by bike.

I understand that's not currently the case in a lot of the world, which is why I think cars need to be banned eventually, not right now.

That's fair, although instead of banning them I'd prefer to just have better alternatives that people naturally transition to. Cars are certainly not a very efficient mode of transport.

This kind of logic is, more or less, why Trump lost -- people (rightly so) don't like being told they have to sacrifice themselves for the economy

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