
Organ transplants down as stay-at-home rules reduce fatal traffic collisions - EndXA
https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2020/05/20/858712314/organ-transplants-down-as-stay-at-home-rules-reduce-fatal-traffic-collisions
======
pkaye
I'm in kidney failure and on dialysis. Also on the kidney transplant list and
was expecting this would happen pretty early on. The stopping and slowing down
of procedures plus the reduction of donor organs. It could easily add an extra
year into the wait time. I myself havet 1+ year in the wait list but that will
probably extend to 2+ years.

To give a sense of wait time, it varies from region to region. The bay area
region is pretty long wait. I think UCSF is 10+ years of wait for a type O
blood recipient. In Sacramento area its a 5+ year wait. If you are type AB
blood the wait is almost half the time. Some parts of the country the wait
times is as short at 1 year.

Although I am somewhat eager for kidney transplant, I also know its not a
cure. They might last 10-15 years before you get rejection and have to get
another transplant or go back on dialysis. But the anti-rejection medications
have slowly improved. Mainly been trying to stay as healthy and stable as
possible.

The stay-at-home rules has also been a blessing though because I do home
dialysis and that takes a lot of time so not having to travel to work means
extra time is available. I even have more time for exercise. My current job
has generally been flexible before but I hope more companies will offer remote
work after this. Even an extra half hour lost on commute hampers my treatment
schedule.

~~~
ummonk
How does this work? Is it possible to move and get on a different waitlist?
It's hard for me to see why they would setup region-by-region waitlists.
Fingers crossed for you.

~~~
pkaye
This is for US but you can get on multiple lists at the same time. However you
have to be able to travel to that center on a short notice. And there might be
false calls where things don't work out. So most people can't list beyond the
local and adjacent regions within a few hours of driving distance. However you
can switch regions and carry your wait time credit over.

As for why the region-by-region setup probably because its a big country and
patients can't travel from one side to another. Also its difficult to change
because any change results is someone having increased wait time. And some of
the states don't like to share their organ streams with others. The reality is
those states with larger organ pool is because more people die there for
whatever reason.

I've also been told that only a small percent of deaths result in viable
organs for donation. I think like 2 out of 1000 is what a transplant
coordinator told me.

~~~
himynameis12345
A lot of the reason for the region by region waitlist is what you said, to
make sure you are capable to get into the hospital within a certain amount of
time to receive the organ. The other part is that it takes time to physically
move an organ from the deceased to the transplanting hospital.

Time is the key here, the more time the organ is not in a living body, the
less likely it is to survive transplantation. So if we didn't have regions,
and you were living in San Fransisco and a kidney came from a dead biker in
Florida, the likelihood of the kidney surviving is less than if that kidney
came from Sacramento.

------
deweller
But another article on HN says "Emptier US roads more lethal in coronavirus
pandemic, report says (bbc.com)"

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23257790](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23257790)

UPDATE: The other article states "14% jump in fatality rates PER DISTANCE
DRIVEN." So the roads are more deadly per mile, but the number of drivers has
decreased so much that the overall harm is down.

~~~
SkyBelow
I think this serves as a great lesson in statistics being converted into news
stories.

The roads are safer.

The roads are deadlier.

Both are true and both are false depending upon if you are looking at the
total or the per driver (and perhaps even if you are looking at per driver per
minute or per driver per mile).

~~~
brenden2
That's why everyone need to learn to separate fact and opinions. Ignore the
conclusions, instead look at the data. Critical thinking skills are in short
supply.

The news is pretty bad in that it's mostly opinions pretending to be
facts/information, with occasional data sprinkled in to support their
conclusions.

~~~
yazboo
But isn't the issue here that both points of view are fact/information-based?

~~~
brenden2
Yes, but what people pay attention to are the conclusions, not the facts.

~~~
SketchySeaBeast
But those are both facts - less people are driving, but if you do drive you're
more likely to be in an accident. Are those conclusions? Would a presentation
of facts just be the data itself?

~~~
sokoloff
Are you more likely to be in an accident? Or are you more likely to be in an
accident with a fatality?

It seems like heavy rush-hour traffic is prone to creating a large number of
accidents with a low total number of fatalities. When I drive around now, I
believe the risk of accident per mile is significantly lower (city dweller
used to typically packed city roads), but due to higher speeds, I can’t make
the same claim about lower fatality risk.

------
jseliger
If people really thought about the number of people killed and maimed in car
crashes, I wonder if we'd see greater support for alternative transportation.
[https://jakeseliger.com/2019/12/16/maybe-cars-are-just-
reall...](https://jakeseliger.com/2019/12/16/maybe-cars-are-just-really-bad-
but-theyre-normal-so-we-dont-pay-attention-to-how-bad/)

~~~
Invictus0
The flip side of this would be to say that auto fatalities are fairly low and
steadily decreasing, with a fatality rate of 1.25 per 100 million miles
driven. For reference, that's 10% greater than the distance between the Earth
and the Sun.

~~~
zip1234
Cars are noisy and take up a ton of space. In cities bikes seem like a way
better way to go, especially with e-bikes. They are quieter, safer, smaller,
and healthier. Auto fatalities are only low compared to previous years of auto
fatalities. Also, electric cars are still noisy. Tire noise at 35 mph is the
same on both electric and IC cars.

~~~
C1sc0cat
For some short journeys in good weather - yes but as the rate of bike theft is
massively more than car theft

Many offices / train staions don't have secure of street bike parking and I
aint going be parking my bike on the street even if its a cheap £400mtb let
alone a >£1200 Brompton

~~~
flaque
Bike theft and lack of bike parking seem like wildly cheaper and easier to
solve problems than the mass of traffic infrastructure problems needed solved
for cars.

------
trixie_
Not one mention in the article about changing the organ donation system to be
opt-out. That is such a wasted opportunity given the huge reach of NPR.

~~~
mdavis6890
This is far too much power for the govt or healthcare industry to have over
people. A lot of people won't know they need to opt-out, and the opt-out can
be, or become, very burdensome.

I know you want to stop wasting valuable organs from dead people that could go
to help living people - and I do too! I just don't want people to lose agency
over their own lives and body parts.

Then there are the wicked, amoral, heartless people - like me - who think
people should be free to sell their organs if they want to. I would personally
sell any of my organs (after I'm dead) for $1 each. But as a form of protest
against the current system, I won't ever willingly donate them.

I hope you'll reconsider.

~~~
xtreme
While I don't think being able to sell your organs is immoral or unethical,
there are practical ramifications that makes it difficult to agree with your
position.

If organ selling is legalized, poor people will be coerced by force or by
money. And they may not realize the full health implications of that until
much later, where they have no recourse.

As a society, we generally try to prevent people from entering such unfair
contracts, e.g, you can't agree to become a slave, or establishing ceiling on
interest rates to limit predatory lending. People willing to sell their organs
are probably desperate enough to agree to anything, and saving them is
worthwhile.

------
teslademigod1
The unintended consequences of covid-19 (both good and bad) are really
surprising.

~~~
nkozyra
I think the best part it is that we're stopping to think about our behavior in
general.

So much of what we do is inertial, normalized insanity that bears some
introspection.

For example, it's interesting to hear so many people talk about how they miss
shopping. I'm the same way, and it made me think ... wait a minute, I've saved
more money in the past two months than I have in years, I don't feel like I'm
missing any tangible goods ... maybe rampant consumerism is, in aggregate, bad
for me?

Same with dining out, which I did with incredible frequency.

All of this makes me think not just about my behavior, but the massive drivers
behind making us all want to spend money on things we don't need in the
pursuit of manufactured pleasure.

~~~
nkozyra
If I may tack on one other observation, it's the sad attempts by companies to
try to profit from the pandemic while looking altruistic:

[https://twitter.com/nkozyra/status/1263106625335734273](https://twitter.com/nkozyra/status/1263106625335734273)

It's a weird statement on where modern startup/retail is.

~~~
at-fates-hands
There's been a lot of press about delivery services gouging restaurants now
that a majority of them are being forced to use them.

I did see the other day Chipolte is doing their own delivery service now which
is awesome. Not sure why more places ditch Grubhub and Doordash and just have
their own in house delivery service. It's so much cheaper than outsourcing to
companies who've been gouging restaurants and the consumer.

~~~
microcolonel
There will be an equilibrium between these things, and it's not necessarily
just “gouging” if delivery services increase prices, given that the actual
supply of drivers (as has been reported here before) is strained.

Basically contract delivery services have a premium to begin with, to take the
delivery business off your hands. If you have dramatically more orders per
day, it can actually make sense to have your own delivery people; especially
since your managers have all the time in the world to focus on delivery now
that your dine-in is closed or restricted.

~~~
daveFNbuck
Even if you have a high order volume, a delivery service should still have
more deliveries near a given destination and be able to improve margins by
grouping those together for delivery.

I may be the only person in my apartment complex ordering Chipotle for dinner
tonight, but there are going to be several others ordering something.

~~~
microcolonel
That is a common assumption for people to make about delivery services, but it
is not that correct with prepared food delivery, where it is unlikely that you
will line up even two pickups without compromising the freshness/hotness of at
least one of the orders; often this is difficult even if both of the pickups
are from the same establishment.

Now, _unlikely_ and _difficult_ don't mean _impossible_ but there's more to it
than meets the eye.

------
goda90
This has also been discussed as a consequence of every car becoming fully
autonomous someday. Crashes will be way down. We need to keep making progress
on lab grown organs.

------
altgeek
This is an old article, but cogently written:
[https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2322914/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2322914/)

"Organs-for-compensation"

------
dang
Related from yesterday:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23251909](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23251909)
("Organ donation in England has moved to an opt-out system").

------
dawnerd
Wow I read that headline wrong. I read it as 'Oregon Transplants..." and was
wondering what reduced collisions had to do with people moving into state.

I've definitely noticed a lot more bad drivers on the road recently. I think
I've hit my dashcam button more times in the last month than I have in all the
years combined.

Wendover also just did a pretty nice video on risk
([https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NtX-
Ibi21tU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NtX-Ibi21tU)).

------
Tiktaalik
Saw a stat from ICBC the public insurance auto insurer in British Columbia.
There's usually around 15,000 "accidents" (let's call them car crashes folks)
a week in the province. With Covid, numbers are down 60% some weeks to ~9000.

Really shows how incredibly dangerous our automobile oriented transportation
system is, and how effective removing cars from the road can be.

------
suprgeek
This was somewhat predictable. I will be really interested in another piece of
data. When we re-open fully (whatever that means) and people get back on the
roads perhaps even more than they used to will it reset the waiting times
because of _excess_ collisions and more fatalities?

------
geerlingguy
For some reason I keep reading this as "the number of people who move to
Oregon is decreasing", and my brain can't draw any connection between that and
traffic collisions. Maybe it's the HN bubble around news focused in tech hubs
on the West coast.

------
walshemj
Also some what misses the fact that a lot of transplant centres stopped
implanting patients due to covid-19,

There is a lot of medical debate on how to do implants / transplants safely in
the current climate.

------
7leafer
Electrocutions, banana-slipping, fork-stabbing and ladder-falling down as
forced self-imprisonment into madhouse soft-rooms reduces stupid domestic
accidents.

Meanwhile in Russia, approx. 3000 people are reported to die of corona in 5
months. In 2019, 16'900 died in road accidents. That gives approx. 7000 in 5
months. Which is twice as many, but I can't remember anyone locking down the
roads, scanning QR codes in order to unlock the car or zealously repeating the
NEW NORMAL, THE WORLD HAVE CHANGED mantra out of every hole. Heck, neither can
I remember anyone constructing concrete barriers instead of purely nominal
double center lines between adjacent opposite lanes where possible!

~~~
JoeAltmaier
But are traffic accidents contagious? We're at 10% infection now. What will
50% look like?

Its cute to deliberately conflate dissimilar things. Corona is different among
mortality statistics in that, everybody can be at risk if we're not careful.

~~~
7leafer
A relative of mine works at the central hospital in my city. She's been seeing
with her very eyes that the department of infections is empty since the circus
began. People with infections other than corona are sent home to cope or die,
because empty beds are reserved for corona. Explain, please. And also explain
by what magic the U07.2 in death certificates is transmuting into U07.1 for
the news and statistics. If you don't know what that means, lookup the WHO's
disease IDs.

~~~
ceejayoz
> And also explain by what magic the U07.2 in death certificates is
> transmuting into U07.1 for the news and statistics.

[https://www.who.int/classifications/icd/covid19/en/](https://www.who.int/classifications/icd/covid19/en/)

"U07.2 COVID-19, virus not identified" changes to "U07.1 COVID-19, virus
identified" presumably when the test results come back. Probable cases versus
confirmed cases.

It's not magic, it's pretty obvious.

~~~
7leafer
It's when relatives of the deceased are bribed to sign an agreement to turn 2
into 1. Without 'presumably'.

~~~
ceejayoz
Bribed by the lizard shapeshifters, I take it?

~~~
7leafer
Yep, the adrenochrome junkie lizard shapeshifters from the other side of the
flat deepstate Nibiru.

Can't you stupid flagging fucks tolerate these words even when used as
sarcasm?

------
izzydata
I get the feeling that shutting countries down saved more lives from fatal car
accidents than the coronavirus would have ever killed if left open.

~~~
foxyv
In the USA there are usually around 35-40k traffic fatalities per year.
COVID19 even with the lockdowns has killed around 95k. With the release of
restrictions, soon there will be more.

~~~
izzydata
WHO claims that 1.35 million people die per year across the whole world in car
accidents.

~~~
foxyv
At the current count of a minimum of 354,000 deaths, we would have to mitigate
26% of traffic deaths world wide for the entire year before it would make up
for the fatalities caused by COVID19. So far it appears that traffic
fatalities haven't decreased that much during the lockdown. In California,
where we have good figures for this sort of thing, there has only been an 8%
decrease in fatal accidents for the first 3 months of 2020 despite an 18.6%
drop in number of miles driven.

Unfortunately it doesn't seem that the decrease in traffic fatalities will
offset more than a fraction of the deaths due to COVID19. Especially
considering that the death toll is projected to easily exceed 1 million
worldwide.

------
kgin
As autonomy in cars becomes more common, organ transplants and small towns
that run on speeding ticket income will have to find new solutions.

~~~
anewdirection
You are making a lot of unfounded assumptions in tht statement. As far as we
can tell, 'self-driving' cars are no safer in real-world conditions any more
than a trained driver is.

I think the biggest safety increse from transportation autonomy, whatever its
form, we are already seeing with Uber et al. Those who would rather not drive,
don't have to.

------
renewiltord
I am not an organ donor. The reason is simple: Everyone in a transplant chain
(Organ Procurement Orgs, Hospitals, Transplant Surgeons) makes money off a
transplant except the guy giving up his organs. The rules for me are clear: I
have a simple price on each of my organs should I be brain dead. Pay the price
to me, and it will go to my beneficiaries in my notarized will, and you can
hollow me out if I'm brain dead. Don't and I take them with me.

~~~
mensetmanusman
Lol,

Can’t tell if this is satire complaining that you won’t make money after
death.

~~~
renewiltord
Haha, many people react in that fashion because I haven't yet met anyone who
has also formed this opinion, but it isn't for me, it's for the family.

Other things that also act to make 'me' money after death: my wealth, my
copyrighted property, my land. No one expects me to give that away for free
even though many would benefit. So no, I won't be giving away my body either.

------
iancmceachern
Need more LVADs

------
ciceryadam
Another NPR article states March fatality rates spiked by 14% -
[https://www.npr.org/sections/coronavirus-live-
updates/2020/0...](https://www.npr.org/sections/coronavirus-live-
updates/2020/05/20/859829779/as-states-locked-down-in-march-motor-vehicle-
fatality-rate-spiked-by-14)

~~~
david422
Both written March 20th.

~~~
orisho
Fatality rates are up, but overall fatality count is down as less people are
on the road.

