Charlie Stross: an alternative explanation for the uptick in road deaths

I found this nugget interesting. Charlie Stross is a British sci-fi author, but also a generally astute commentator on technology and politics on his blog. Here he suggests mass cognitive damage from COVID-19 as one of the causes.

We’re surrounded by the signs of pervasive low-level brain damage on every side. Having come through an acute pandemic wave of COVID19 in 2020, governments everywhere now seem to be in denial that the pandemic is ongoing—and we have vaccines that diminish the acute impact of the virus from life-threatening to merely “a bad cold”. But it’s not a bad cold! It causes widespread inflammation throughout the lining of the blood vessels, including the brain’s circulatory system. Cognitive damage is apparent and is one of the symptoms of long COVID: it causes symptoms ranging from stroke and Parkinsonism to dyscalcula and even dementia. If you’ve noticed poor, erratic, or angry driving in the past couple of years, road manners are one of the more evident signs of what’s going on. Cars are a proxy for bodies in public space and elderly drivers are notoriously bad; we’re now seeing a lot of aggressive, oblivious, and inexplicably bad driving behaviour routinely, and an uptick in accident rates. There may be other less obvious side-effects: I suspect the angry political discourse is to some extent inflamed by the brain inflammation of the folks who think COVID19 is over.