The average person drives more than 10,000 miles every year. That amount varies, of course, based on where you live, where you work, what you do, and whether you simply like driving, but that’s the average. For context, 10,000 miles is the distance you would cover if you drove back and forth between New York and Los Angeles four times. It would take about six and a half days if you drove non-stop.
Driving can also be dangerous to some extent. You have to have training in order to drive. You have to have your car inspected and registered. You’re not allowed to do it when you’ve been drinking or consuming certain types of medications.
But while driving has its dangers, it’s not actually dangerous. At least not in the way we commonly think about danger. Most of us sing in our cars, we talk on the phone, we think about life. We definitely do not grip the steering wheel tightly and pray for freedom from the hurtling death machine into which we have bound ourselves.
In truth, it’s very unlikely that any given person will die in a car accident. Based on a little simple math, your risk of dying in a car crash on any given day is about 1 in 3 million. If you extend those odds out over the course of a 75-year life, the chances are lower than 1 in 100 that this will ever happen to you. It’s just highly, highly unlikely.
But we know that people die in car accidents. It happens every day. In fact, this very rare, unlikely thing, happens approximately 100 times every day. In 2019, there were 36,120 motor vehicle fatalities according to data from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. In my lifetime, there have been more than 1.3 million people who died in car accidents of some kind.
That’s a lot of people! Each one is an individual tragedy. Each one was grieved and left an absence in someone’s life. We try to prevent it (and we’re actually getting better at it, the rate of fatalities has been cut by more than half since 1972), but also accept the risk with little consideration and return to our 10,000 miles of driving.
My point here is a simple one: Very unlikely things happen ALL THE TIME in a country as big as the United States. Something that has a 99% chance of never happening to you at any point in your life will happen to someone 100 times every day. Something that has a 1 in a billion chance of happening on any given day? It’ll happen twice a week in a country as big as the US.
It’s important to understand this because we have to understand the context of our world and we also have to understand the context of how stories get told in that world. Take the coverage of the COVID-19 vaccines as one example. Many people have highlighted stories of people who have had adverse reactions to the COVID-19 vaccines. Some of these reactions, like flu-like symptoms, are fairly routine and expected side effects of vaccination. Others, like the scattered instances of blood clots that temporarily suspended the use of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine, are a bit scarier.
It’s important to cover issues of public safety. It’s important to be aware of potential bad outcomes. That’s a good instinct, but it’s also important to recognize how incredibly rare those bad outcomes are. More importantly, it’s vital to understand why they are being covered. They’re novel. They’re new and we don’t quite have the experience to slot them into our normal understanding of the world. That’s why some people get scared by vaccine reactions that are incredibly rare, but they aren’t freaked out about dying on their way to work even though that’s arguable the more dangerous behavior. Familiarity breeds comfort.
This isn’t only true for COVID coverage either. It’s true of the way we discuss a host of issues. It’s true of the way we talk about terrorism. It’s true of the way we talk about gun violence. It’s true of the way we talk about child sex trafficking. They’re scary and they’re intense. They freak us out and when they happen, they are truly horrific tragedies. We don’t want them to happen at all. We should work, hard, to make sure they happen as little as possible. But the truth is, they don’t actually happen that much. It’s just that we live in a very, very big country, and things that “never happen” happen all the time.