People literally die more because of these changes. Statistically measurable increase in mortality on these days. Save lives, stop changing the clocks.
Yes, more people die in the few days after the short night in the spring, but then there is a lower average mortality in the few days after that, and overall there is no net difference. Likewise in the fall, there is a slight dip in the day or two after the long night, but it washes out over the next week.
And people only die more because they get run over by drivers at a higher rate. I'd say here the glaring problem is not the timekeeping, but designing our urban infrastructure for cars, so that when a person is just a teensy tiny bit more sleepy, they end up killing people by accident, rather than you know, putting on their shirt inside out and having people point and giggle. Cars pretty much make worse everything they touch, like in this case, the ability to flexibility set a clock however we see fit.
It’s also things like medical care getting screwed up. A tired surgeon is a horrible thing. And a surgeon can’t exactly go make up that lost hour easily..
Interesting, I've never heard that, although it seems like it would make intuitive sense (people more tired than usual from lack of sleep?). I searched around a bit and found a couple of articles that others might find interesting:
I'm too dumb to know what modalities means but simply, a lot of people end up with 1 hour less sleep because they're not tired at the normal time and over a population of 300+ million, more mistakes are made driving and people with poor health experience elevated stress due to lack of sleep. A non-zero amount of people pass away the day of from these issues.
Presumably, being late to work or more tired leads to more car crashes. Super anecdotal but I saw two horrible wrecks yesterday, when I normally see 0.
A bunch of missed healthcare appointments (not everyone uses their phone to tell the time!) happen after the change and diminishes over the following weeks.
I hate to be that guy but if you're dying because the clocks changed and it was too much of a burden for you to re-adjust (like literally everyone else does) then oh well.
Policy decisions based on dodgy, whataboutism-esque figures is, in my opinion, what undergirded the incredibly incompetent COVID response here in the US, and elsewhere.
Yikes. It’s not that someone had a stroke because they found it too hard to change the clocks. It means, measurably, that bad things can happen. Maybe your doctor is a bit more tired because he lost an hour of sleep and his surgery goes a little wrong and you’re dead. Worth it to change the clocks?
> Policy decisions based on dodgy, whataboutism-esque figures
You're arguing that people should increase their exposure to acute myocardial infarction (among other concerns) to account for dodgy whataboutism-esque energy consumption figures from the 1910s and 40s-50s that have been observed to actually increase energy consumption in modern times?
The US observance of DST was done for energy consumption, largely coming out of our 2 world wars when energy was a key issue. That said, in watching a state that relatively recently adopted DST, it actually increased energy consumption[1].
Meanwhile, research has shown that the impact of losing an hour due to DST observation has an impact on the heart[2][3][4].
So this policy appears to be one that literally saves lives while at the same time having the additional benefit of potentially reducing energy consumption at a time when we're dealing with an energy crisis.
