California is statewide locked, requiring most nonessential businesses to close or have extremely limited density. In addition to the restrictions, San Francisco has implemented its own quarantine procedure for everyone entering the city. But it turns out that the damage COVID has done this year is significantly less than that of the drug fentanyl. More than three times as many people have died from fentanyl overdoses as from the virus.
Fifty-eight people died of drug overdoses in San Francisco last month, bringing the annual total to at least 621. That is compared to 441 deaths in all of 2019.
The latest figures put San Francisco on track for losing nearly two people a day by the end of the year, overshadowing the 173 deaths from COVID-19 that the city has seen so far this year.
That’s 173 deaths from COVID and 621 from fentanyl overdoses. And as bad as 621 deaths sound, the number could have been much worse:
The crisis, sparked by the powerful pain reliever fentanyl, could have been much worse had it not been for nearly 3,000 uses of Narcan from January to early November to save someone from the brink of death …
The data shows the number of times people use Narcan with the Drug Overdose Prevention and Education Project, a city-funded program that coordinates San Francisco’s response to an overdose, or return to replenish their supplies. DOPE project officials said that since the numbers are self-reported, they are likely to be a large under-number.
So the number of deaths could easily have been 10 times the death toll from COVID, if not for Narcan. And all this is only one city’s experience of a rural problem. Last week, the CDC announced a large increase in fatal overdoses:
The most recent preliminary data available from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS) indicates that in the United States in the 12 months ending May 2020, approximately 81,230 overdose deaths drugs have occurred (Figure 1) .i This represents a worsening drug overdose epidemic in the United States and is the largest number of overdoses ever recorded over a 12-month period.
Many of those rises are related to fentanyl and are mainly concentrated west of the Mississippi. The CDC has published this map showing where the increases were most severe (dark red means a> 50% increase).
Of course, the overdose death toll nationwide (81,000) is smaller than COVID’s (319,000), but again, that’s partly because we have a highly effective overdose treatment (Narcan) that has been used tens of thousands of times to prevent deaths in the past .
With the vaccine being rolled out and we can see the light at the end of the COVID tunnel, the fentanyl crisis and the impact it is having on the nation should get a little more attention.