Covid Crash Testing: Seat Belt Adoption Data Mirrors Vaccination Hesitancy
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Volvo seat belt data is a valuable tool to gauge the adoption of the covid vaccine
Consumers have a long history of avoiding the things that make them safer. For example, seat belts: Since the 1950s, Sweden's largest vehicle maker, Volvo, has studied over 43,000 vehicle collisions for issues like front and back impacts, child safety, and traumas like spinal injuries.
Throughout all those decades, the carmaker has made that analysis public.
From the beginning researchers faced a grim, but relentless truth: Consumers flatly refused to make themselves safer in cars. Particularly when it came to three-point seat belts. Such safety belts were first offered as standard equipment by Volvo in 1959. But it took until 1975 for 90 percent of all Europeans to adopt safety belt usage. That’s when belts were mandated. In America, the Department of Transportation and New York State prodded users to buckle up starting in the mid-1980s. But the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration estimated that it took all the way until 2016 (!) for American drivers to break through the 90 percent belt usage threshold.
Resistance to seat belts still lingers: New Hampshire, for example, tabled the last attempt to mandate seat belt use in 2018.
The U.S, National Safety Council confirms Volvo’s data: Seat belts do save lives. It’s interactive dataset indicates that mortality-per-100,000 population peaked in 1937, when no one drove with safety belts. 30.8 people per 100,000 died. By 2020, 9 out of 10 vehicle occupants wore belts. Only 11.9 people per 100,000 were killed.
National Center for Statistics and Analysis show death rates fell as seat belt use rose.
Death rates and seat-belt use can be explored geographically. The National Center for Statistics and Analysis breaks out vehicle crash data by state, for both rural and urban areas. In 2020, the deadliest place to drive was rural Puerto Rico. The safest was Massachusetts. Go figure.
A Clear Lens into Covid’s Future
Volvo’s seat-belt adoption data is reassuring news for today’s fractious debate over vaccine hesitancy. Resistance to seat belts was just as stubborn during an era when Americans were less culturally divided. This a country that simply hated to be told to buckle up, as they hate to be told they to get injections.
Seat belt adoption indicates politics simply fits into vaccine hesitancy. It does not cause it. That’s a plus.
Also, the 45-year history of seat-belt use provides an elegant means to time vaccine adoption. Regardless of when vaccine usage will climb above 90%, the story of seat belts indicates widespread use is going to take decades.
How seat belts were finally adopted reasonably frames questions that can be asked about vaccines:
Did adoption rates change as seat belts become standard equipment?
Did messaging around seat belt adoption help usage or hurt it?
What regulations worked. Which ones didn’t?
Are their alternative safety steps we can take. Airbags save lives too.
Seat belt data is the clever tool investors can use to value the unknowns pandemics seem to spin off. Eventually, people make the right choice. It just takes time.
Like seat belts, vaccines is an endurance road test. Not a drag race.