Elon Musk Thinks Chances Of Dying In A Car Crash Are Higher Than Dying Of Coronavirus In US

The COVID-19 coronavirus has brought the whole world to a halt, with companies asking employees to avoid travelling and even working from home. Across the globe it has infected over 120,000 people and claimed lives of more than 4000 people.

Reuters

Last week, we saw Elon¡¯s reaction to coronavirus outbreak when he tweeted, ¡°the coronavirus panic is dumb.¡±, and Tweeple surely had a gala time reacting to this. However, it looks like his views for the novel coronavirus are still the same.

Reported first by Buzzfeed, a recent SpaceX memo that Musk sent to his employees, he told them that they have a higher chance of dying in a car crash than dying from COVID-19.

He said, ¡°As a basis for comparison, the risk of death from C19 is *vastly* less than the risk of death from driving your car home. There are about 36 thousand automotive deaths per deaths [sic], as compared to 36 so far this year for C19.¡±

Yes, we know that the two situations aren¡¯t comparable by any means. This disease is spreading since its a viral infection that gets transferred from one man to another -- clearly that cannot be the case with car accidents.

Reuters

Today, according to the Centre for Disease Control, US has over 1,629 confirmed cases of COVID-19, with around 41 deaths. However, according to a report by the Atlantic, what¡¯s worse is that since people in the US aren¡¯t testing their symptoms, so the actual number could be a whole lot more.

Health officials (reported first by New York Times) in the US predict that if all hell breaks loose, around 160 to 214 million Americans could get infected with the novel coronavirus -- if proper measures aren¡¯t undertaken to contain it. Moreover, of the aforementioned infected 1.7 million people could actually die.