Professor and author Keith Gandal is part of the team that discovered a link between stress, increased fatal car crashes and blue states during the pandemic.
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.
As is known, 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 was initiated by the Gandal brothers and Fuks because they wanted a way to quantify the level of anxiety and fear felt by the population at large. “It was so palpable in New York City. I’d never seen a population like this. I also noticed that during the pandemic people, drivers, and pedestrians, stopped following traffic signals,” said Keith Gandal.
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. That is showing something dramatic. We showed what everyone knew. That fear isn’t something to play with lightly.”
This is the second research study conducted by the Gandal brothers about the pandemic. Their previous research found lower death tolls on the weekend during the height of the pandemic.
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Thea Klapwald
e:
tklapwald@ccny.cuny.edu