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A comment on Why car insurance in America is too cheap. Parent comment

Re:Why car insurance in America is too cheap by npunt on Sunday February 04, 2024 @04:10AM (#39248746)
Huge missing variable is cognitive impairment from covid. It may affect up to ~20-30% of people several months after getting it [1][2][3], but whatever the exact rate, it's an amount that is orders of magnitude more than the accident rate.

"The most frequent symptoms seem to affect memory, attention, and concentration" [4].

We generally suck at assessing our level of impairment (see drunk drivers), so if we're used to driving a certain way and no longer have the capacity to do so safely, eventually something's going to happen to some of us.

Given the magnitude of ongoing covid infections and the still very low per capita accident rate, this could be the single best explanation of an uptick in accidents. It's not a surprise it's overlooked though, as statistically we don't really track cognitive abilities except in education contexts and individually we tend to downplay or ignore any changes in how we think. Cognition is largely invisible as a measure.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/13/upshot/long-covid-disabil... or https://archive.ph/RnBZ2

[2] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8715665/

[3] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8798975/

[4] https://www.bmj.com/content/384/bmj-2023-075387

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Re:Why car insurance in America is too cheap by LorenPechtel on Monday February 05, 2024 @04:28PM (#39267467)
I hadn't thought of that aspect but I strongly suspect this is the cause.

If a change happens gradually you're not going to notice it until there's some glaring indication of it. And you often won't notice that things haven't returned to baseline when you know there was a deviation. (Observation: Long Covid is more common amongst athletes. Really? Or are they actually measuring a baseline and seeing they aren't what they used to be?)

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