Be safe out there.
And no, this isn’t about COVID-19.
It’s about everything else.
It’s about being on a ladder to look at your shingles, about driving your car, about being trapped in the house and deciding it’s a good time to install new flooring using that chop saw you always wanted to get the hang of using.
You have to watch out more than ever for accidents that are waiting to happen.
It’s even about driving, which seems counterintuitive, given how open and empty roads are with people staying at home to self-isolate with their families.
But it seems the lure of the open road is just too much for some — even more so when the road is more open than usual.
In Ontario, the Ontario Provincial Police said Tuesday that they had already issued 270 street racing tickets in the greater Toronto area in March, and they’ve gone to social media to warn the local lead-foots to lay off the accelerator.
It’s not the same story everywhere.
There are a lot of different factors in the accident equation, to be sure, but there’s one ironclad fact: the place you don’t want to have to be right now is in the hospital.
There’s been a drop in the number of automobile accidents in some areas due to sharply reduced traffic, like Phoenix, Arizona, where a drop in daily traffic has meant a 75 per cent reduction in the number of driving accidents.
But in other places, both the number and the severity of crashes has increased. In Kansas City, the number of collisions is up marginally, but the number of crashes with injuries is up by almost 35 per cent over the past three months.
A car accident — or any other accident, for that matter — is something well worth avoiding.
There are a lot of different factors in the accident equation, to be sure, but there’s one ironclad fact: the place you don’t want to have to be right now is in the hospital.
You’d be draining resources from a health-care system that’s girding itself for heavy strain — and, on the selfish side, you’d also be putting yourself in the very same place that most of the most seriously ill COVID-19 patients are likely to be kept, even if you’re not in the same area. Cross-contamination can happen, no matter how careful people try to be.
You don’t have to be a rocket scientist — or a brain surgeon — to see that hospitals like the Health Sciences Centre in St. John’s are preparing themselves for the risk of large numbers of COVID-19 patients. You don’t have to look any further than the parking lots. The hospital has clearly been successful in emptying as many beds as possible, and the nearly empty lots are a sign of how there are fewer patients and even fewer visitors.
More, now than ever, they don’t want you there if you don’t absolutely have to be there.
There’s a popular saying that you can’t cure stupid.
But you can say, “Hey, I’ll stop and think for a moment.”
