The following description was taken from TOLL Group: COVID-19 and road safety.
The coronavirus pandemic has arguably seen the greatest disruption to Australian society and its economy since the Second World War. Data is emerging showing how the pandemic changed (and is changing) the way freight and people move on the road network. Some of the initial results are intriguing. Intuitively one would expect that as road travel reduced due to lockdown restrictions then road fatalities would also fall. To some extent this has proven true, as shown in the graph below, based on data from ADVI. In all but one state and territory, petrol sales (used as a proxy for distance travelled) and fatal crashes fell during the period between March and July 2020 compared to the same period three years earlier.