It was one week ago when President Trump’s comparison of the novel coronavirus pandemic to the number of deaths in car crashes each year prompted me to explainwhy that analogy made little sense. The argument came down to rate of change. Yes, nearly 40,000 people die in car crashes every year, far more than had died at that point from covid-19, the disease caused by the virus. But the number of people dying from covid-19 was escalating quickly and was expected by some experts to pass the number of annual automobile deaths.
We don’t shut down the economy for 40,000 annual vehicle fatalities — but we also don’t see the number of automobile fatalities increase by a factor of 10 every 10 days.
One main point of that article (and another looking at Trump’s comparison of the coronavirus to the seasonal flu) was that we simply didn’t know how many deaths covid-19 would cause in the country. That was on March 24, when the number of deaths totaled 706. Continue reading.