The Pandemic Is Over. The Pandemic Driving Isn't.

On April 8, NHTSA released its 2024 early fatality estimate and practically threw confetti: 39,345 dead, down 3.8% from 2023, the first time below 40,000 since the pandemic started. Eleven consecutive quarters of declining fatalities, and NHTSA framed every one as momentum. Down to 1.20 deaths per 100 million vehicle miles traveled, the lowest since 2019.^[1]

That number deserves a closer look than it got.

The pre-COVID seven-year average fatality rate, 2013 through 2019, was 1.13 deaths per 100 million VMT.^[1] Americans drove approximately 3.279 trillion miles in 2024. Multiply by 1.13 instead of 1.20 and you get 37,050 deaths. Not 39,345. That leaves 2,295 people who would probably be alive if Americans drove the way they did before March 2020. NHTSA's own press release acknowledged the rate "remains high relative to many peer nations" and sits above the pre-COVID baseline, then moved on to talk about partnering with law enforcement.^[1]

Run the same math backward through every year since the pandemic began and the cumulative toll becomes harder to wave off. In 2022, at a rate of 1.34, the excess was roughly 6,700 deaths above what pre-COVID driving norms would have produced. In 2023, still 1.26, the excess was around 4,200. Add 2020 and 2021, when the rate hovered near 1.37 despite fewer miles driven, and the five-year surplus approaches 27,600 deaths that nobody in Washington counts as a category, because "post-pandemic behavioral persistence" does not have a line item in any budget or a ribbon on any lapel.^[2]

What changed? Academic literature is remarkably consistent on this: COVID cleared the roads, drivers discovered they liked speed, and the habit stuck. A 2023 study in the Journal of Safety Research documented persistent increases in speeding, following distance violations, and hard braking events that outlasted every wave of the virus.^[3] The Governors Highway Safety Association testified before Congress in February 2026 that traffic enforcement staffing never recovered to pre-pandemic levels, leaving the behavioral shift essentially unpoliced.^[4] When enforcement vanishes and the behavior persists, you are no longer describing a temporary anomaly but the new normal.

The strongest counterargument is that the pre-COVID baseline was already rising before 2020. In 2016, the rate spiked to 1.19 on the back of smartphone distraction, and it took three years to pull it back down to 1.11.^[5] Maybe the pandemic merely accelerated a trend that was already grinding upward, and the "excess" deaths are partly a continuation of pre-existing behavioral decay rather than a discrete pandemic artifact. That critique has teeth: if you benchmark against 2014's 1.08 instead of the seven-year average, the 2024 excess balloons to 3,900 deaths. Benchmark choice changes the number, not the direction.

So: 39,345 dead, the lowest in five years, still roughly 2,300 above what the same miles would have cost seven years ago. NHTSA publishes the rate in every annual report and buries the implications inside a sentence about "remaining elevated." Meanwhile the agency's proposed countermeasure is to partner more closely with law enforcement, the same workforce GHSA says never restaffed after the pandemic hollowed it out.

What this means for you: Pre-COVID rates are not some aspirational target from a lost era. They reflect driving behavior as recently as January 2020. If you set your cruise control at the speed limit, leave following distances you learned in driver's ed, and put the phone in the glovebox, you are individually driving at a 1.08-rate level. That 2,295-person gap is a collective behavioral deficit, not a mechanical one. It does not require new technology or new regulation, just driving the way most Americans claim they already do.

Limitations

This analysis uses NHTSA's published fatality rates and FHWA's VMT estimates. The pre-COVID average of 1.13 is itself a composite of years with different confounders (the 2016 smartphone spike, opioid-related impairment trends, vehicle fleet age shifts). Attributing the entire rate gap to "behavioral persistence" overstates certainty; fleet composition, infrastructure changes, and demographic shifts also contribute. Our cumulative figure of approximately 27,600 uses VMT back-calculations and should be treated as a ballpark, not an audit-quality number. FARS captures fatal crashes only; injury-crash trends may tell a different story.