President Trump made a logically sound point about our shutdown of society on Monday evening.
“You look at automobile accidents, which are far greater than any numbers we’re talking about. That doesn’t mean we’re going to tell everybody no more driving of cars. So we have to do things to get our country open.”
On a simple factual level, this is true. More than 36,500 people die in U.S. traffic crashes annually. By the end of this week, about 1,000 people in the United States will have died from the coronavirus. The worst day of U.S. coronavirus deaths as of this writing is 225, which is awful. The average day of U.S. traffic deaths is 100, meaning more people have died this month from car crashes than from the coronavirus.
Nobody is pleased by 100 traffic deaths per day. We take plenty of steps to curb such deaths, and some of those steps have worked.
Yet we haven’t shut down driving. We never ordered people to give up nonessential drives; we never closed schools; we never ran a public information campaign telling people to stay home and save lives on the highway. Why not?
I think it’s easy for readers to assume that when you compare traffic deaths with the coronavirus, you are somehow diminishing coronavirus deaths. But it’s nevertheless useful to compare these two different threats, because exploring their similarities and differences, and the similarities and differences in public policy responses, can be informative.
So here’s the key similarity: Both driving and the coronavirus are deadly. Both of them have spurred societal responses, involving both technology and restrictions on free action.
And then here’s a difference that Trump was pointing out: With automobiles, our society has implicitly accepted that 100 deaths per day is better than harsher restrictions on liberty that could lower those deaths (such as a driving age of 21, a 10 mph speed limit, cars that cannot speed, or instant license revocations for moving violations). With the coronavirus, any talk of moderating our restrictions and getting society “opened up” again causes widespread freakouts and condemnations, as if there is no acceptable trade-off.
So why the difference?
It’s easy to assume that it’s simply politics — that the media is freaking out about getting our country open again because Trump is the one proposing it. (And yes, that’s part of it, of course.) But I think there more profound differences — some substantive and some are psychological. Here are a few:
Coronavirus deaths might soon exceed 1,000 per day
Highway deaths in the U.S. are 100 per day and slowly falling. If someone proposed a dramatic deregulation of driving that would cause daily traffic deaths to go up tenfold, we wouldn’t accept it.
Coronavirus daily deaths are increasing every day. The daily body count was 225 on March 24. That’s twice what it was on March 22, which was twice what it was on March 19, which is twice what it was on March 17. If this pace were to continue, we’d pass 1,000 deaths per day by the end of March, and perhaps four times that in the first week of April.
At that point, when new hospitalizations stand at maybe 10,000 per day, our hospitals will be overrun. That doesn’t happen with auto accidents.
So that’s a simple, arithmetic reason to take coronavirus deaths more seriously than automobile deaths: There are more of the former every day than the latter, and there might soon be many more.
Coronavirus is more terrifying, and psychology matters for social cohesion
Humans have never seen all deaths as equally upsetting, and so we have always taken stronger steps to prevent some deaths than we take to prevent others.
For instance, after 9/11, when terrorists killed about 3,000 people, we dramatically remade our country. Flying became different, we entered two different wars, and we sacrificed privacy for security. Some of these reactions were obviously mistakes, but they reflected the very human fact that the threat of terrorism worries us more than the threat of heart disease.
With guns, it’s the same. Public mass shootings are exceedingly rare, yet they get much more media and legislative attention than the numerous handgun deaths that occur every night.
Coronavirus is far newer than car crashes, and so, it’s a lot scarier. With the coronavirus, death can be lonelier and more terrifying than other ways of dying. It’s a contagious disease, and so as long as it is spreading, our perception of our neighbors and coworkers changes — they are now potential threats to us.
So it’s possible that coronavirus deaths and hospitalizations are more societally damaging than traffic deaths and hospitalizations.
Coronavirus, unlike traffic accidents, could possibly be stamped out with aggressive short-term action
If social distancing and quarantining work as we hope they will, then the coronavirus’s rapid spread will not last too long, thanks to better testing, better treatment, and some share of the population becoming immune. This could, in turn, allow us to loosen the restrictions and thus open our society up somewhat.
But that all depends on flattening the curve and slowing the spread for a few weeks.
There’s no analogy here in the area of traffic accidents. If we spent two months reducing miles driven and reducing speed driven through dramatic new regulations, that would push deaths and hospitalizations down for only those two months. There would be no long-term benefit to temporary restrictions on driving.
On the contrary, there is every reason to hope that short-term restrictions on life in public will have long-term benefits in the fight against the coronavirus.
Generally, the U.S. government and our various state governments honor human dignity by respecting more of our freedoms than most governments do for their people. Balancing those two deeply moral concerns is incredibly difficult. We shouldn’t be too simplistic in our balancing efforts.
