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Comment by simion314 | Hacker News Reader

But why cars? It would make sense if you are an extreme capitalist to put money in the equation, how much a life costs, how much lockdown costs, how much it costs to find a cure, how much it costs to let everyone sick die but it would make no sense to bring cars into this, think about it your calculation would be different depending on the country or state, like if you are in the country with horible driving bad luck now you will also die from covid.

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Because we will always drive cars, and in 5 years there will be no coronavirus. Would it have been better to spend our resources on more complex airbag systems that would last as long as humans drive or a lockdown to save our oldest population for 3 years?

I think this math problem is easier than we would like, but politically it's unpopular.

Let's assume cars kill N people a month, and the next pandemic kill N-1 old people a month and cancer kills N-2 people a month. We do nothing until we solve the cars? What if it kills N-1 children we still do nothing?

I do not see the argument that the resources should go to cars, if you want to solve car accidents you can do it for free, I have the secrets here:

- don't give a diving license that easy. have decent tests

- if you are caught drunk you should never drive again

- if you are caught looking at a phone screen your license is gone for 10 years

- if you are speeding your license is gone for 10 years

- test the cars every 2 years to check they are safe and not polluting

- analyze the crashes find the causes and address them, if speeding is the issue find a way to enforce speed limits.

Do you have any evidence that if the lockdown did not have happened more lives would have been saved? Ironically probably less people died in car accidents so you need to find some domain where the number of deaths increased more then the lives saved,

I think the point is, Forcing people to stay home is a solve against cars and coronavirus. The death rate for cars is higher, so why haven't we forced a lockdown to deal with car deaths? What makes the Coronavirus different, besides that it's been 100 years since we've had a serious pandemic?

I think your assumptions might be wrong though, if I use the numbers from here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_traffic-r... and calculate for Italy I get 3600 car fatalities, and there are aprox 18000 deaths by covid with a lockdown on. Let me know if my numbers are wrong.

Italy's a bit of an outlier due to both average age and how they count covid deaths. If we look at Germany instead, we get 3.6K deaths by car (in 2016) vs 1.8K deaths from covid. There are all kinds of different assumptions about unconfirmed cases etc, but even in the most optimistic scenarios, it's roughly the same order of magnitude either way.

But don't ignore that Germany also treat the coivd like "not the flu" if Germany would do nothing like you suggest the numbers would be larger, to honestly support your point you need to find a country that did exactly what you want (nothing or just pray) and show that the mortality is better then car crashes when the pandemic is over.

What is the probability of someones mother, father, grandmother, grandfather and all uncles/aunts die at the same time because of car accidents?

If they all are now above 50 chances they might die because of this virus are quite high.

That is high price if one is losing his social grounding when he is 20 because he survived... Yeah he might get inheritance and have his young friends but I would not be happy if most of my relatives are dead.

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