Pandemic paradox: Less driving, more traffic deaths

Accidents involving cars are one of the biggest sources of deaths in the US. The last year has seen a seeming paradox. While the pandemic resulted in fewer cars on the road and fewer miles driven the number of traffic-related accident fatalities actually increased.

It’s a public health crisis in any year, and somehow, the pandemic has only made it more acute. Even as Americans have been driving less in the past year or so, car crash deaths (including both occupants of vehicles and pedestrians) have surged.

Cars killed 42,060 people in 2020, up from 39,107 in 2019, according to a preliminary estimate from the National Safety Council (NSC), a nonprofit that focuses on eliminating preventable deaths.
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Light at the end of the pandemic tunnel?

Sometimes it seems like this pandemic will never end. We have been teased in the past that things were looking up, especially early in the summer when vaccinations were being rolled out and the numbers of Covid-19 cases, hospitalizations, deaths started decreasing. But then the Delta variant kicked in and we went back into mask-wearing, physical-distancing, and hunker-down mode. Or at least some of us did.

But now a respected team of scientists who form the COVID-19 Scenario Modeling Hub that advises the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention say that the worst really may be over and that their models, under varying conditions, predict that we should start to see declines lasting all the way through March of 2022.

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The scandal of food waste in the US

I was brought up with enough food to eat but wasting was severely frowned upon. You served on your plate what you thought you needed and then ate all of it. That was not an uncommon practice in Sri Lanka and I suspect in many developing countries. That habit has persisted throughout my life so that to this day I almost never throw any food away. Whatever is bought is cooked and eaten. It is a bit of a joke in my family that I will eat food even if it has just started going bad. If cheese is getting moldy, I will cut out the spoilt part and eat the rest. The same with fruits. I ignore the sell-by date and only throw something away if it smells bad or is obviously rotten. I would save even the tiniest amount of leftover food after a meal, put it in the fridge, and then mix it into an omelette or something later and eat it. I actually find such ‘savory’ omelettes very tasty.
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How many steps a day should one take?

I wrote last year that the popular prescription that one should walk 10,000 steps a day in order to obtain the health benefits of activity originated as an advertising and marketing scheme and had no scientific basis. Research suggested that one did not need so many steps to get the benefit. But how many would be desirable?

This article summarizes some of the recent recommendations.
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The curious history of polywater

One of the more curious incidents in science history is ‘polywater’. The existence of polywater was suggested by a Russian scientist Nikolai Fedyakin in the early 1960s and gained ground as other people also seemed to be able to detect physical properties in certain samples of water that were not present in others, suggesting that a new state of water had been created. Of course, we know that water can be in different states such as ice and steam but what was new was that polywater was a different kind of liquid water.

This article explains how the idea gained ground before it was debunked.
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Norm Macdonald on battling cancer

The comedian just died of cancer at the age of 61. I had never actually seen him perform but read that he had a droll deadpan manner and an offbeat take on the mundane. I came across this audio recording of a stand up bit that he did ten years ago that dealt with something that also has struck me as odd, that when it comes to cancer, people who have it are always described as ‘battling it’, a fighting metaphor that is rarely applied to other ailments.

Macdonald had apparently kept his cancer diagnosis secret so that his death came as a surprise to those who knew him. Maybe he did not want to have people talking about him too ‘battling’ cancer.

Public Service Announcement: Never trust someone’s friend about anything

In the crazy media world we live in these days, I saw multiple headlines about a story in which Nicki Minaj had tweeted that a friend of her cousin who lived in Trinidad and Tobago got swollen testicles and became impotent after taking a covid-19 vaccine and his fiancee called off their wedding. The ensuing publicity resulted in the minister of public health in that country wasting his time investigating this before announcing that they could not any evidence of swollen testicles.

I grant that this story has many clickbait features: A celebrity, covid-19, impotence, and swollen testicles.

But really? Whenever you hear an outlandish story, your guard should immediately go up. And you should definitely ignore the story if it is ascribed to an unidentified friend of even someone you know personally, let alone someone whom you do not know at all. That almost guarantees that the story is at best highly exaggerated or more likely outright false.

This has been a Public Service Announcement. We now go back to our regular programming.

Dan Ariely’s work called into question

In my teaching work and on this blog, I have often referred favorably to the work of behavioral economist Dan Ariely who devised ingenious experiments to tease out human behaviors and motivations. (See here for the posts where I have discussed his work.) I have recommended his book Predictably Irrational which, as the title succinctly suggests, argued that while people are often irrational, their irrationality is not random. He has also given very popular TED talks.

A lot of his research dealt with the issue of honesty: what corners people are willing to cut, by how much, and how they view themselves. So I was disappointed to read that he may the latest example of an academic who has been sloppy or worse in the way that he has conducted his research, throwing his work into doubt.
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The Costa Rican health care system

In the August 30, 2021 issue of the New Yorker, Atul Gawande takes a close look at the health care system in Costa Rica that, within a few decades, improved so rapidly that now its people have a higher life expectancy than the US and at a much lower cost. The numbers alone tell the story.

In 1950, around ten per cent of children died before their first birthday, most often from diarrheal illnesses, respiratory infections, and birth complications. Many youths and young adults died as well. The country’s average life expectancy was fifty-five years, thirteen years shorter than that in the United States at the time.

Life expectancy tends to track national income closely. Costa Rica has emerged as an exception… Across all age cohorts, the country’s increase in health has far outpaced its increase in wealth. Although Costa Rica’s per-capita income is a sixth that of the United States—and its per-capita health-care costs are a fraction of ours—life expectancy there is approaching eighty-one years. In the United States, life expectancy peaked at just under seventy-nine years, in 2014, and has declined since.

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