then you should avoid any and all cars as you have a 1 in 100 lifetime chance of dying in a car accident. or birth, as babies have 0.6% chance of dying around birth.
covid suffers severely from availability and recency bias because our lives are so exceedingly safe already. it’s hard to die on accident, even via covid.
Although I feel you were trying to make the opposite case, I think events like COVID should illuminate the dangers and inadequacies of other elements of our lives. If you've read "The Maniac of New York" comic, it makes a similar point: a murderer that can't be stopped eventually just becomes accepted by society. Perhaps we have recency bias with COVID, but we have a more worrying complacency bias with other elements of our lives, like cars. Dramatic life extensions and quality of life improvements come when people stop accepting that "meh, people get sick and die," and instead get curious and start pushing for "burdensome" things like public sanitation.
Perhaps more importantly though, the ICU is getting filled up and causing other unrelated ailments to become worse. This isn't the case with most the other things you listed.
> babies have 0.6% chance of dying around birth
This one is hard to avoid unfortunately, unless you believe in Pixar's "pre life" world from "Soul". Also, arguably avoiding it leads to 100% mortality depending on how you count "not living". Neither here nor there, but I wasn't really a fan of that movie.
the “hospitals filling up” narrative is mediopolitically-motivated justification, not grounded in deductive reasoning nor meant to drive effective mitigative policy.
I think you may have a recency bias towards the mitigation techniques. The reason it seems like there's no hysteria around cars is because we've already gone through that phase and implemented the best safeguards we could come up with: the right analogy here is to see what a stickler our society is for having car insurance, which is the closest thing to a "car accident vaccine" we could come up with. Given the reality of the frequency of car accidents, and how they can potentially affect others just as much as yourself, we've implemented a system where it is a requirement to have a way to compensate the other person if an accident happens (not to mention the various laws we have around driving, the big deal that was Mothers Against Drunk Driving, breathalyzer checkpoints which could be seen quite analogously to covid testing, the fact that we need a license to drive and are tested for driving proficiency, the penalties for driving unsafely, laws requiring you to buckle your safety belt, laws around safety belts and airbags needing to be included in cars, etc. etc.). If we had an actual hypothetical "car accident vaccine," we'd probably just require you to have that instead of this tremendously complicated and expensive infrastructure around driving.
So I'd argue that what we actually don't see is heightened emotion around this onerous car infrastructure, to the point where you are essentially presenting cars as some sort of model for c'est-la-vie attitudes both from the general population and the government, which couldn't be farther from the truth. The reality is you've just gotten used to the burdens we've taken on to make our activities livable with respect to cars. Go watch the "Not Just Bikes" YouTube channel and you'll see just how much of your life is actually completely governed around accommodating cars (and a big part of that is in making their presence safer).
> the “hospitals filling up” narrative is mediopolitically-motivated justification, not grounded in deductive reasoning nor meant to drive effective mitigative policy.
Source?
