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Comment by viburnum | Hacker News Reader

American has three times the traffic death rate of the Britain and six times of Norway’s. What’s the benefit?

Based on the statistics I have seen, if the US took Sweden's approach to the current epidemic (which has been recently held up as a model on HN and elsewhere) and got similar results, an additional 30,000 people would have died thus far. I haven't seen anyone bring this up and ask for an accounting of the benefit that is greater.

While there has been a high death rate in Sweden, especially in elderly homes which weren't isolated properly, you have to be careful when comparing stats between countries. Sweden seems to file more deaths as COVID, instead of just attributing it as death by age, heart attack, or some other unexplained reason, including those dying in elderly care and not only those in hospitals.

Here is a more complete summary: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22945974 NYC had 30% increase of unexplained deaths recent months, whereas Sweden had -4%.

Ranking countries is not the point; the point is that people who endlessly lecture on why the US is inferior have no particular preference for whether 30,000 more or fewer Americans die, so rhetoric pretending to be concerned about highway deaths seems vapid and insincere.

You seem to be confirming that you are one of those people for whom a conversation that mentions the US can have no fixed point other than how inferior it is to Europe or the Nordic countries. Which is what I'm annoyed by. It's the lack of genuine dialog that is the issue.

Agreed. If you just believed it all, you'd think Nordic countries never do anything wrong and other countries should just do what they do. But they're in a league of their own. And sorry to say but it's minor leagues in the world stage. You can't just mimic what might work there if you're in a completely different league.

Uh huh, I said Norway. The point is that not every cost has a benefit. If you're so offended by international comparisons, check out US states:

https://www.cdc.gov/motorvehiclesafety/states/occupant_death...

I don't know that California (4.2 deaths per 100,000) would be somehow more productive if people died form cars at the rate of Missouri (10.2).

Inventing just about everything ever? America also has 50% more GDP per capita than the UK. Perhaps the extra 200% traffic deaths are needed to provide that boost.

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