NEW
YORK, April 24, 2024 /PRNewswire/ -- New
research led by City College of New
York English professor Keith
Gandal reveals that road fatalities spiked during the
COVID-19 pandemic despite a significant decrease in driving due to
lockdowns. Gandal, in the Division of Humanities and the Arts, and
his brother Neil Gandal, professor
of economics at Tel Aviv University,
along with Maya Fuks, an MA student
at Tel Aviv, investigated the relationship between the COVID-19
pandemic in the U.S. and fatal car crashes. Road fatalities were a
lesser-known category of excess deaths during the pandemic, going
up despite a significant decrease in driving due to lockdowns.
In 2020, compared to 2019, the total miles traveled by car
decreased by 11% yet there was an increase of 6.8% in fatal car
crashes. The fatality rate per vehicle miles traveled increased by
21% from 2019 to 2020.
According to the research of the Gandals and Fuks, the
increase, however, was not uniform. Blue states that voted for
Biden in 2020 experienced a larger percentage increase in fatal car
accidents per miles driven during the first four months of the
pandemic (March through June 2020)
relative to the same period in 2019. In the case of states that
voted for Biden, the average percentage increase in fatal car
accidents per miles driven per state was 45 percent while the
increase was just 22 percent in states that voted for Trump.
Interestingly, this partisan distress gap mirrors the fact that
Democrats by and large experienced more intense lockdowns and more
apprehensive media coverage of COVID-19 than Republicans did.
During the next four months of the pandemic (July – October 2020), when COVID-19 was less prominent
in the news and lockdowns had eased, the difference in the
percentage increase in fatal car accidents per miles driven between
Biden and Trump states was statistically insignificant: 29% for
Biden states versus 25% for states that voted for Trump.
The research, which appeared in the February issue of "European
Society of Medicine," showed a "shocking correspondence," according
to Keith Gandal, "In N.Y. State
there was a 37 percent increase in fatal car accidents per miles
traveled in the first four months of the pandemic."
This is the second research study conducted by the Gandal
brothers about the pandemic, which found lower death tolls on the
weekend during its height.
Media contact: Thea Klapwald,
tklapwald@ccny.cuny.edu
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SOURCE Foundation for City College