I don't own a car -- I take the subway to work (about 25 minutes each way). But it seems dumb to use the subway at this time, which means I have to work from home. If I had a car, I'd feel safe commuting.
A car is also the "solution" to an individual problem -- "how do I get safely from A to B?" -- but this is a societal problem: "how do we as a society overcome this disease while causing as little damage as possible?". Solutions must be oriented towards the community, not the individual. Everyone using their cars, if they even have them, is not the solution.
I live in SF and don't own a car. It's never been more tempting for me to get one. I live alone, far from family, and now seemingly can't see my friends or significant other. It's already getting incredibly lonely. A car would enable me to at least go straight to my gf's place without being in contact with anyone, or to the pharmacy for meds without taking public transit.
Well, I didn't mean to. In fact, I'm advocating for the community at large. An individualistic "solution" ("if only I had a car, I would be able to [...]") is not the best solution for the problem at large. Everyone fending for themselves, driving their cars, is obviously not the answer, and in fact it might make things worse.
That you, and many others, are feeling pretty lonely and isolated is part of the reality of this outbreak. It's obviously going to be very hard for a lot of people. Many people's livelihoods are at stake here, regardless of the seriousness of COVID-19. Unfortunately this is going to have some big consequences regardless of individually owned cars.
update: it seems the city of SF has an advisory, and is mandating (among other things) against taking "unnecessary" trips in public transportation, car or motorbike: https://sf.gov/stay-home-except-essential-needs
Some excerpts:
"You cannot have dinner parties. You cannot invite friends over to your home to hang out.
[..]
You cannot take unnecessary trips on public transport or in your car or motorbike."
"Can I leave home to visit friends or family members if there is no urgent need?
No. For your safety as well as their safety, we need to help each other fight the spread of COVID-19 by staying at home."
Public transit, walk, bike, or... rent a car.
Since last week I have been driving 100% & not using transit. Now is not the time for reusable mugs & public transit. Right now we optimize for distancing & isolation, not resource conservation.
Mine wasn't an argument about pollution or the environment, but about individualist vs collective solutions.
I don't see this as a poor solution to my particular needs, but I do look forward to it being electric and charged from solar panels on my roof.
It's not that unusual in desert communities like mine.
Our food will be more expensive and it should be but all those other parts of rural living are just this horrendous climate abuse.
EDIT: Oops, I mean the costs should be baked in. Obviously governments should provide food aid.
Urban populations have their own fair share of climate related problems.
Sounds to me like you just want people to starve in order to solve your precious climate ‘crisis’.
Without a car it's incredibly difficult to fulfill even a trip to the pharmacy with only a compromised public transportation system.
Some people stocking up on supplies, to the detriment of their neighbors, is also a "solution"... to those people. Not to their neighbors. A "solution" must scale, otherwise it's selfish. Even worse, if a lot of people think "cars are the answer!" they are compounding the problem.
Fighting coronavirus requires a societal response, one that works for most people and where people don't take individual actions that seemingly benefit them (and only them).
> Not everyone has 24-hour public transportation available.
I don't think public transportation is the safest choice at this moment either. In fact, everyone should avoid it if at all possible (in some cases and parts of the world, it's not possible at the moment).
[1] Not stocking up on things since I constantly pass stores that contain necessities, locating myself where I can access a dozen parks (and a million activities) instead of having lots of personal living or yard space, not owning a car since I can easily (and cheaply) rent or take the subway...etc
edit: Commenter below asked for citations, which is reasonable. :-)
This comment applies to the USA only.
There were 37,991 deaths classified under one of the WISQRS "Motor Vehicle Traffic Death" codes last year.[0]
Another 1000-3000 are reasonably counted also, for example, the 203 deaths coded as "Pedestrian injured in nontraffic accident involving other and unspecified motor vehicles." (this includes some cases of people injuring themselves with cars on private property, etc).
I think we can safely say 40,000, without even including any part of the long-term health effects of cars; this is just deaths from crashes.
We've had 71 deaths from COVID-19 so far[1]. We don't know how many total infections or transmissions have occurred; estimates vary unbelievably wildly because of so little test coverage. [2]
It's possible that our death rate is high, more likely that, at least so far, it is much, much lower than has been published in the media (the 8% of people over 65 figure, for example, uses only confirmed cases, which almost certainly represent only a tiny fraction of cases).
Based on these numbers and sources, I think it's a reasonable assertion that the number of otherwise unexpected deaths to result from COVID-19 is unlikely to be higher than the number killed by cars.
1: https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/
2: http://perkinslab.weebly.com/uploads/2/5/6/2/25629832/perkin...
If we don't do drastic measures, many experts are citing numbers in the high hundreds of thousands to over a million (example [1], which is well worth reading). But if we do act, the experience of China, South Korea, and Singapore teach us that we can do better.
[1] https://tincture.io/dispatch-4-from-the-front-lines-79c74fa6...
(I want to link https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/notes-from-ucsf-expert-panel-... which actually does give numbers, but that might no longer be available)
But the numbers you've cited do not represent a mainstream view in the papers currently being reviewed and published as far as I can tell.
Give this a read, "2019-novel coronavirus (2019-nCoV): estimating the case fatality rate—a word of caution": https://smw.ch/article/doi/smw.2020.20203
...and for that matter, take some time to consider generally the resources on CIDRAP; they are one of the few academic centers that seem to be actually focused on science instead of hype. http://www.cidrap.umn.edu/
> It is not the case that "many experts are citing numbers in the high hundreds of thousands to a million people".
You are objectively wrong on this. The UCSF panel on 3/10 presented an estimate with a range of 1.5 million on the high side. Dr. Osterholm said on the Joe Rogan podcast, "We conservatively estimate that this could require 48 million hospitalizations, and over 480,000 deaths over the next 3-7 months." The Imperial report warns of up to 2.2 million in the US, and even with mitigations in place a large number of fatalities. Not one of the epidemiologists I follow on Twitter has called this estimate into question, and many have praised the report.
Nobody has the real answers, and we all have to do our best interpreting the evidence that's out there, but making shit up is not helpful.
ETA: I found a working link to the 3/10 UCSF panel: https://tincture.io/an-expert-covid-19-panel-from-ucsf-664a3...
As best I can tell, he is citing the "leaked webinar" for hospital prep from the American Hospital Association. I can't find this document or other interpretations of it.
But yeah, I was dead wrong about what he said. ---
Ahh, gotcha.
I think there's some confusion about what we're talking about.
I thought you were talking about a number of deaths in the USA (ie, compared to my pointing to the approximately 40k traffic deaths).
480k deaths, the CIDRAP estimate cited by Osterholm (which, by the way, I can't find a PDF for - do you happen to have a link), is unlikely to include more than 40k US deaths; I don't think there has ever been a pandemic where the US accounted for 9% of the worldwide deaths, has there?
For example, the 2009 H1N1 outbreak saw 284,000 deaths worldwide, with 12,000 in the USA. [0]
> The Imperial report warns of up to 2.2 million in the US, and even with mitigations in place a large number of fatalities.
We might need help interpreting the 2.2 million number - it is described as the calculation of an "unmitigated pandemic", and appears to take the worst death rate for each age group observed worldwide and combining it with the "cumulative ICU cases trigger" (the report loses me here), and then simply applying it to the USA population.
In other words, I don't think it's meant as a prediction, but a ceiling to define the parameters of the report.
But again, I'd appreciate some help interpreting.
0: http://www.cidrap.umn.edu/news-perspective/2012/06/cdc-estim...
That means (2 ^ N) - 1 cumulative grains of rice on the N first squares.
So 63 total grains of rice on the first 6 squares is correct.
It seems unadvisable to look at exponential curves with a linear mindset…
Consider a different way of estimating:
There are >300m people in the US.
It's easily conceivable that >50% of them could catch the virus.
CFR is likely to end up >.5% (Korea, with excellent medical care and very widespread screening, so probably one of the smaller numerators / largest denominators around, still currently has rates higher than that).
That would already give a rather high number of fatalities. And if the health care system gets overloaded, CFR is going to be quite a bit higher than assumed above.
[Disclaimer: Not medically trained or otherwise qualified]
That reallllllllllly depends on how we respond as a society in the coming weeks...
I wouldn't be so sure. Italy may hit that amount this week. Italy has 3,333 deaths from car accidents per year. They currently have 2,158 deaths from covid-19, adding 368 just today.
It's actually not. It's a good argument for actually diversifying our transit options so people have real choice.
A lot of people aren't really pro transit options. They are really for public transit and/or against cars.
If it is easier to do a mix of walking, public transit, etc, then there's no single point of failure.
If the transit system isn't overloaded, you can sometimes find yourself on the bus by yourself for a bit.
If you have flexibility to work from home or go in when you feel like it, that's another way to not be trapped in a crowded bus or whatever.
We need to break some lockstep patterns, not trade one monolith for another, which tends to be the argument.
> If it is easier to do a mix of walking, public transit, etc, then there's no single point of failure.
I have "real choice". Subway, buses, uber, walking, biking. That's normally how I get around.
But I, someone who relies on public transportation, have noticed that there are, in fact, situations where owning a car is advantageous. Like an epidemic.
Forget my commute. I can't visit my sister, who lives 15 miles away, without uber/metro/bus. Those options would put me in the wake of hundreds or thousands of other people. If I had a car, I could just drive and it would be significantly safer.
I'm not saying "everyone should buy a car". I'm noting that, hey, there actually are situations where being able to safely move around by yourself is helpful. That's not so shocking!
That's my entire point. You should have a choice.
It shouldn't ever be an argument of "all public transit, all the time" versus "cult of the car." But Americans turn it into an either/or argument all the time.
Take care. Safely move around as you choose.
Wash your hands.
Stop touching your face.
I'm a little bewildered at how you've chosen to communicate but, uh, have a nice day.
But the 80/20 rule tends to apply. If you do whatever small and easy things are immediately possible, you get 80 percent of the way there and it frees up resources and extends the runway so that last hard 20 percent can be resolved or at least better tolerated.
But once you're on the bus there's only so much social distancing you can do. What are you going to do then? Thus, the car is the ultimate vehicle if you don't want even want a driver.
Renting a car is the lowest hanging fruit right now for dealing with this problem. If you have a low hanging fruit suggestion then put it out there, but it's not trying to socially distance yourself on a bus, right?
When I gave up my car, I was in an apartment complex within a twenty minute walk of four shopping centers. There were two other apartment complexes lined up next to mine.
No one walked. They literally got in their car to drive their trash to the dumpster or pick up their mail or go to the pool.
Me and my sons began walking. And when you walked, you didn't have to go all the way down the hill to the street. You could cut through the grass and one of the shopping centers didn't even require you to cross a street.
If you aren't familiar with various options, you don't have the mental maps to do things quickly and easily. You impose mental maps from an unrelated process and draw inaccurate conclusions because your brain superimposes the car path you would need to take when you aren't going to go walk down to the street and walk in the street, etc.
I gave up my car and the internet told me it was not a walkable neighborhood because there was no theater or something. My favorite grocery store was on the corner.y bank branch was across from it. I was near my job and other shopping.
It wasn't perfect, but it met a lot of my needs. I'm not a big movie goer. I did not care that there was no theater.
And I can talk until I'm blue in the face and people who don't walk as a form of transit will shout me down and tell me I'm a whack job.
But if you want to beat this thing, you may find that you have other options to do things you need to do if you will just look for them.
Sir down and list an essential task.
Food.
Work.
Banking.
Write out the sticking points. Why is this a problem currently.
Brainstorm alternatives: ATM, online banking, PayPal, prepaid debit card, e-gift cards, etc.
Search Google maps for all nearby options. Zoom in. Think about what's actually conveniently close.
I'm not saying no one should drive. I'm just saying it's not better for driving to become the new monolith everyone should pursue because of the pandemic.
Shopping when it's less crowded is effective. It's a practice I'm pursuing. It reduces exposure and it has nothing to do with how I go there. It's just a function of timing.
You don't need a personal vehicle, you need to figure out how to stay home.