January 18, 2022

I’m a lumberjack and I’m ok

By

The Herald has a story about ACC injury claims in Auckland during the lockdown.

Popular hobbies and chores like spring gardening, riding new e-bikes, lawn mowing, running and climbing ladders to paint resulted in 113,960 accident claims by Aucklanders during last year’s 107-day lockdown.

Reading on, you find that the e-bikes were involved in only one twentieth of one percent of that total (and not broken out  by new and old), but there’s a reasonable amount of detail given

There are usually two questions to ask about an ACC-based story like this one. First, are the injuries actually attributable to whatever it is the story is about? Second, is there an actual increase in injuries.  Usually the answers are “yes”, and “no, respectively: Christmas day brings injuries that are clearly Christmas-attributable, but fewer in total than a normal work day.  Usually the first question can be answered from the story, and the second takes some additional research.

This story is unusual in that we genuinely seem to have an increase in injuries, though as usual it takes some work to find this out.  Looking at historical ACC data, there were 245,149 claims for Auckland in the 2018/2019 financial year, the last year of the Before Times. Over 107 days that would scale down to about 72000, so we’re seeing nearly a 60% increase!

My guess is that the pattern would be different in other regions — it will depend on who was staying home and how risky their usual job would be.  Compared to the times before Covid, the lockdown would have increased some risks and decreased others; in Auckland the increase seems to have been larger than the decrease.

 

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Thomas Lumley (@tslumley) is Professor of Biostatistics at the University of Auckland. His research interests include semiparametric models, survey sampling, statistical computing, foundations of statistics, and whatever methodological problems his medical collaborators come up with. He also blogs at Biased and Inefficient See all posts by Thomas Lumley »

Comments

  • avatar
    Megan Pledger

    Also, some of these jobs were going to be done sometime e.g. spring cleaning, painting, it’s just that the opportunity of lockdown made them happen then.

    If someone wanted to paint then they might ordinarily do it randomly at any point in the year but instead the opportunity of lockdown meant they could do it then rather than later.
    It would be interesting to see if there is a near-equivalent decrease in injuries once lockdown ended.

    2 years ago