Page 12 - IAV Digital Magazine #560

iAV - Antelope Valley Digital Magazine
By
Byron Hurd
Those who choose not to obtain a COVID vaccination may pay for it
come insurance r enewal time thanks to a new study that found that unvaccinated drivers were more than 70% more likely to get into a severe car crash than the average driver. So, does this mean that the vaccinated are benefiting from 5G superpowers after all? No, the study authors
say;
this is merely an example of peo- ple exhibiting mul- tiple types of risky behavior.
The study, pub- lished in The American Journal of Medicine (h/t
to Fortune) earlier in December, evaluated the accident reports and vaccination status of the more than 11 million drivers in Ontario, Canada, from 2021. During the period studied, 6,682 people were hospitalized following involve-
ment
in severe crash- es; of them, 75% (5,000) were unvaccinated. When evaluated against other known conditions, the magnitude of the estimated risk (72%) was similar to the increase associated with sleep apnea, less than that associ- ated with alcohol misuse, and greater than that associated with diabetes.
"Our data do not explore potential causes of vaccine hesitancy or risky
driv-
ing," the study's authors said. "One possibility relates to a dis- trust of govern- ment or belief in freedom that con- tributes to both vaccination pref- erences and increased traffic risks. A different explanation might be misconcep- tions of everyday risks, faith in nat- ural protection, antipathy toward regulation, chron- ic poverty, expo- sure to misinfor- mation, insuffi- cient resources, or other personal
beliefs. Alternative factors could include political identity, negative past experiences, limited health lit- eracy, or social networks that lead to misgivings around public health guidelines These subjective unknowns remain topics for more research."
In other words, skipping a vacci- nation doesn't actually make you more likely to crash your car; it just means that you're more likely to be the type of person who would have crashed it anyway, which is why your auto insurance compa- ny might take an interest in your vaccination sta- tus, especially if you have other things going against you, including a ticket history, points, or other factors such as poor credit. Being expensive to insure doesn't mean a car is inherently unsafe; it often has just as much (if not
more) to do with the type of driver that car typically attracts. In actuar- ial science, every data point mat- ters.
The authors said the study busts some other widely held misconcep- tions. For starters, it shows that crashes dispro- portionately involve those in poverty, contrary to claims that traf- fic safety is unre- lated to health disparities. Even more pertinently, it contradicts claims that social distancing would lead to fewer severe traffic inci- dents, corroborat- ing other reports about increasing highway
deaths since the onset of the pan- demic.
But consider this: What if it's not that drivers got worse during COVID, but that risk-takers were far more likely to be on the roads during a pandem- ic in the first place?
iAV - Antelope Valley Digital Magazine
Not Vaccinated Against Covid? It Could Raise Your Auto Insurance Rates