Driving vs. Flying in the COVID-19 Era

Kevin Drum

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I’m not just a former management dweeb, I’m also a general purpose dweeb. So naturally I was interested when this question was posed last night on Twitter: which is safer, driving from San Francisco to San Diego or taking a plane?

The driving part was pretty easy. DOT estimates 150 fatal crashes per billion miles driven. It’s about a thousand miles round trip between San Francisco and San Diego, so that means the chance of dying is about 0.015 percent. Roughly 15 in a hundred thousand.

The flying part is trickier: you need to know both the odds of getting infected with coronavirus and the odds of dying from it. The latter is fairly easy. Assuming a normal, healthy, middle-aged adult, the case fatality rate is about 0.2 percent or so.

The odds of being infected in the first place, however, is hard to get a handle on. I read one paper that outlined an absurdly complicated model of virus transmission in airports and airplanes, but the authors were mostly interested in showing off their new algorithm and how it reduced compute time by 59x on a supercomputer. They never actually put a number to anything. However, WHO says that traveling by plane is pretty safe, and given how sparsely filled planes are these days, I can believe it. So let’s be very liberal and figure the odds at 1 percent for the round trip. I don’t think anyone can complain that I’m lowballing this. With these two numbers in hand, the chance of dying is 0.002 percent. Roughly 2 in a hundred thousand.

So flying wins pretty easily. Aside from the usefulness of knowing this, it’s a good demonstration of how the availability heuristic frames our estimates of danger. Getting killed in a car crash is something we live with all the time, so we tend to discount it. Conversely, COVID-19 is brand new and we’re all scared of it, so we tend to overestimate it. But driving is still pretty dangerous!

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WHO DOESN’T LOVE A POSITIVE STORY—OR TWO?

“Great journalism really does make a difference in this world: it can even save kids.”

That’s what a civil rights lawyer wrote to Julia Lurie, the day after her major investigation into a psychiatric hospital chain that uses foster children as “cash cows” published, letting her know he was using her findings that same day in a hearing to keep a child out of one of the facilities we investigated.

That’s awesome. As is the fact that Julia, who spent a full year reporting this challenging story, promptly heard from a Senate committee that will use her work in their own investigation of Universal Health Services. There’s no doubt her revelations will continue to have a big impact in the months and years to come.

Like another story about Mother Jones’ real-world impact.

This one, a multiyear investigation, published in 2021, exposed conditions in sugar work camps in the Dominican Republic owned by Central Romana—the conglomerate behind brands like C&H and Domino, whose product ends up in our Hershey bars and other sweets. A year ago, the Biden administration banned sugar imports from Central Romana. And just recently, we learned of a previously undisclosed investigation from the Department of Homeland Security, looking into working conditions at Central Romana. How big of a deal is this?

“This could be the first time a corporation would be held criminally liable for forced labor in their own supply chains,” according to a retired special agent we talked to.

Wow.

And it is only because Mother Jones is funded primarily by donations from readers that we can mount ambitious, yearlong—or more—investigations like these two stories that are making waves.

About that: It’s unfathomably hard in the news business right now, and we came up about $28,000 short during our recent fall fundraising campaign. We simply have to make that up soon to avoid falling further behind than can be made up for, or needing to somehow trim $1 million from our budget, like happened last year.

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