California is under a state closure that requires the closure of most non-essential businesses or the density is extremely limited. In addition to the restrictions, San Francisco has implemented its own quarantine procedure for anyone entering the city. But it turns out that the damage caused this year by COVID is significantly less than what the drug fentanyl has done. More than three times more people have died from fentanyl overdose than have died from the virus.
Fifty-eight more people died of drug overdoses in San Francisco last month, bringing the annual total to at least 621. That compares to 441 deaths throughout 2019.
The latest figures put San Francisco on the verge of losing nearly two people a day by the end of the year and worsen the 173 deaths from COVID-19 the city has seen so far this year.
Thus, there are 173 deaths from COVID and 621 from fentanyl overdose. And as bad as 621 deaths may seem, the figure could have been much worse:
The crisis driven by the powerful analgesic fentanyl could have been much worse had it not been for the almost 3,000 times Narcan was used from January to early November to save someone from the brink of death …
The data reflects the number of times people report using Narcan in the Drug Prevention and Overdose Educational Project, a city-funded program that coordinates San Francisco’s response to the overdose or refills the supply. DOPE Project officials said that since the figures are self-reported, they are likely to be a major sub-county.
Therefore, the death toll could easily have been ten times the death toll per COVID had it not been for Narcan. And all of this is just a city’s experience of a problem nationwide. Last week, the CDC announced a large increase in deadly drug overdoses:
The most recent provisional data available from the National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS) of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) indicate that there were approximately 81,230 deaths from drug overdoses in the United States during the twelve months ending May 2020 (Figure 1) .i This represents a worsening of the drug overdose epidemic in the United States and is the largest number of drug overdoses over a twelve-month period ever recorded.
Much of this increase is related to fentanyl and has been concentrated mostly in western Mississippi. The CDC released this map showing where the increases have been most severe (dark red means an increase of> 50%).
Of course, the number of overdose deaths nationwide (81,000) is lower than that of COVID (319,000), but again this is partly because we have a very effective treatment for overdoses (Narcan) that was used. tens of thousands of times to avoid deaths in the past course.
Now that the vaccine is 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 draw attention.