Thursday, May 13, 2004

West Nile vs. Illinois roads

My wife told me this morning that West Nile has turned up. She heard that 54 people in Illinois were killed last year. I said that's almost as many as die in a week on the roads, but she didn't believe me.

With a teeny bit of searching, I found an Illinois Department of Transportation (IDOT) page called "Crash Reports" with a link to a PDF for 2002. According to that, "1,420 persons died in crashes in Illinois during 2002." That's 27.3 per week. OK, so it takes two weeks of auto deaths to beat West Nile's deaths from last year.

Bonus factoid: 127,719 persons were injured in crashes in Illinois in 2002. That's about 350 per day.

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