I was poking around after a few conversations about driving/parking being worse now than pre-covid and it looks like about a quarter of people who’ve had mild covid may be experiencing visuospatial deficits?
Maybe there are problems with this paper that I’m not seeing but this seems potentially relevant to the traffic safety conversation.
@kissane @inthehands
The timing also makes me wonder about embodied deskilling/forgetting from a lack of regular practice for over a year or two.
Driving a car requires ongoing intuitive, somatic, probabilistic physics calculations -
1. how much force to apply to accelerator to get the car to certain speed
2. calculating separation to not hit the car in front
3. whilst visually sub-second scanning to update a memorized, time series model of the space to your back, left and right via mirrors.
@dahukanna @inthehands Yeah, I’ve been assuming that the bad during during year one and the bad driving after are…not necessarily the same people or kinds of error/carelessness, even.
@kissane @dahukanna
Totally agree. And more broadly, there’s just a mess of potential causal factors here that are near-impossible to disentangle:
• COVID damage to brain
• Loss of driving practice
• Disruption of routine causing anxiety, sleep loss, etc
• Same but for economic downtown, job loss
• Same but for living through a resurgence of fascism
• Trauma of living through the largest mass death event in the US in living memory with minimal acknowledgement / processing / healing
@kissane @dahukanna
Like…I don’t think science, punditry, or our own community conversations have begun to get a grasp on just how much the past 3–7 year have screwed us all up.