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Comment by xyzzy21 | Hacker News Reader

More people die (and have major medical/quality of life impacts) from car driving than do die from COVID by an order of magnitude.

If we want to solve problems most efficiency, it must be by selecting causes in Pareto ranked order thus cars should come before COVID regardless.

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The fallacy is that auto accidents are neither tremendously infectious nor adaptive.

Covid-19 is both.

Even with the relatively limited consequence of automobile accidents, societies collectively take numerous measures to reduce risks, from highway engineering, traffic laws, and safety equipment to requiring individuals to participate in specific practices --- wearing seatbelts, using child safety seats, and not driving whilst impaired, amongst them.

This is not true. Using the U.S. as an example, there have been over 70,000 COVID deaths since April (previous 5 months). Yearly auto accident deaths typically are between 30,000 and 40,000. COVID has killed twice as many people in less than half the time, even during a period of widely available vaccines.

completely agree! right now there's news headlines about how terrible the 2021 Sturgis Motorcycle Rally (locally relevant to me) was as a "superspreader" event, because people are getting positive PCR tests after the fact. however, there's been 0 covid deaths resulting from the 2021 Rally, while there was the usual single-digit (4 this time) traffic deaths. (when you take into account the sheer number of attendees and the sheer amount of drugs and alcohol consumed during the event, this is actually a shockingly low number!)

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