Cedric Stephens | The COVID factor in road fatalities

Assistant Commissioner of Police Gary McKenzie, head of the Public Safety and Traffic Enforcement Branch, has his hands full. Fatal accidents are occurring on our roads daily.

This newspaper quoted him last Wednesday as saying: “Over the past 10 days, we’ve had about twelve persons that have died along the roadways because of motor vehicle crashes. The type of crashes that we have had indicates that we need to slow down on the roads because several of them are a result of driving at excessive speeds, ignoring the road conditions, cornering at fast speeds, and overtaking when it is unsafe to do so. These crashes have caused serious injuries, damage to motor vehicles and persons have died.”

Not even the increased presence of the police on the roads, the new regime of increased fines for violations of the 2018 Road Traffic Act, which were approved in Parliament on Tuesday, February 22, 2022, and improvements in the enforcement infrastructure, appear to have had any effect on driver behaviour.

Last December, the Private Sector Organisation of Jamaica’s Public Safety Monitoring Committee called on the Government to respond swiftly to “an upward trajectory in the number of road traffic collisions and fatalities by fully enacting the revised Road Traffic Act”. Its call followed a report by the Ministry of National Security that revealed an eight per cent increase in road fatalities for the period ending September 2021.

Today’s article will offer clues about what could be causing the local spike in road traffic fatalities.

“Two years into the pandemic,” wrote The New York Times on February 14, 2022, “fatalities are soaring into record territory amid a nationwide flare-up in reckless driving. In various initiatives to reverse the trends, authorities in one state after another are citing factors from the rise in anxiety levels and pandemic drinking to the fraying of social norms.”

On August 24, 2020, Dr Perri Klass wrote in the same publication that “a new Centers for Disease Control and Prevention survey among 18 to 24-year-olds reported the highest levels of symptoms of anxiety and depression, and a quarter of them said they had seriously considered suicide”.

The head of the US flight attendants’ association reported to the United States Congress last October, according to The Guardian, that the US Federal Aviation Authority had logged 4,284 unruly passenger reports since January. At this rate, the association head said, 2021 was poised to produce a higher passenger misconduct incident count “than the entire history of commercial aviation”.

There have been 426 million cases of COVID-19 reported worldwide and 5.9 million deaths. The corresponding numbers for Jamaica as of last Thursday were 127,741 and 2,791, respectively.

THE PANDEMIC AND MENTAL HEALTH

Dr Sotiris Vandoros, of King’s Business School, King’s College, London, argued recently in a BMJ article that “there have been reports that the pandemic is also affecting other health outcomes. These may include delayed diagnosis and treatment, mental health problems, suicides, and excess mortality in general”. His paper cited previous research that suggests “financial worries and economic uncertainty are associated with motor vehicle collisions (MVCs) and that daily fluctuations in economic uncertainty have been linked to MVCs in Great Britain. Possible reasons include distraction, frustration, sleep deprivation and worrying about loved ones who have COVID-19 may also cause distraction, thus leading to car crashes, as it has been previously shown that people whose partner is hospitalised are at a higher risk of being involved in a collision”.

Last year, the number of traffic deaths in the US soared to 38,680, the most since 2007, according to a Los Angeles Times article on December 8, 2021. Ken Kolosh, a researcher at the non-profit US National Safety Council, said: “We didn’t know what was happening. One possibility was that stressed-out Americans were releasing their anxieties on the wide-open roads. He guessed that fatal accidents would decline in 2021 when traffic returned. He was wrong. The latest evidence suggests that after decades of safety gains, the pandemic has made US drivers more reckless – more likely to speed, drink or use drugs and leave their seat belts unbuckled.”

The LA Times also reported that:

• Alcohol sales have soared, drug overdoses have set new records, and homicides have seen their biggest increases on record;

• Frank Farley, a Temple University professor of psychology, who views reckless driving as a form of rebellion – or what he calls ‘arousal breakout’, said: “You’ve been cooped up, locked down and have restrictions you chafe at, so, if you can have an arousal breakout, you want to take it.”;

• Fatalities are up in cities and rural areas, they have spiked on highways and back roads, risen during the night and the day, weekdays and weekends, and climbed in every age group between 16 and 65; and

• The death rate among black people rose more than three times the overall death rate.

Could the same things that have been reported to have occurred in the United Kingdom and in the US that led to a spike in crashes in those countries also be contributing to the rise in crashes in Jamaica? The IMF, in its recently released Article IV report, stated that the country was hit hard by the pandemic. “An early lockdown in the spring of 2020 helped contain the number of COVID-19 cases but the impact on the economy was severe, with real GDP shrinking by 10 per cent.”

National Road Safety Council: Shouldn’t you be collaborating with the behavioural scientists at our tertiary institutions and the Ministry of Health & Wellness to understand the nature of the problem that we are experiencing on our roads?

Cedric E. Stephens provides independent information and advice about the management of risks and insurance. For free information or counsel, write to: aegis@flowja.com or business@gleanerjm.com