California is in a state-level deadlock that requires the closure of most non-essential companies or extremely limited density. In addition to restrictions, San Francisco has implemented its own quarantine procedure for anyone entering the city. But it seems that the damage caused by COVID this year is significantly lower than that caused by the drug fentanyl. More than three times as many people have died from fentanyl overdoses as they have from the virus.
Fifty-eight people died from drug overdoses in San Francisco last month, bringing the annual total to at least 621. This compares to 441 deaths in all of 2019.
The latest figures put San Francisco on the other track of losing nearly two people a day by the end of the year and reduced the 173 deaths caused by COVID-19 the city has seen so far this year.
So, there are 173 deaths due to COVID and 621 due to fentanyl overdoses. And no matter how bad 621 deaths seem, the number could have been much worse:
The crisis fueled by the powerful analgesic fentanyl could have been much worse if it had not been almost 3,000 times when 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 to the Drug Overdose Education and Prevention Project, a city-funded program that coordinates San Francisco’s response to overdose or returns to replenish its supply. DOPE Project officials said that since the figures are self-reported, they are probably an insufficiently large number.
So the number of deaths could easily have been 10 times the number of COVID deaths, if not Narcan. And all this is just the experience of a city with a national problem. Last week the CDC announced a large increase in fatal drug overdoses:
The latest provisional data available from the National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS) of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) indicates that approximately 81,230 drug overdose deaths occurred in the United States in the 12 months ending in May 2020 (Figure 1) .i This is a worsening of the drug overdose epidemic in the United States and is the largest number of drug overdoses for a 12-month period ever recorded.
Much of this growth is related to fentanyl and was mostly concentrated west of Mississippi. The CDC published this map showing where the increases were most severe (dark red means an increase> 50%).
Of course, the number of deaths caused by overdoses nationwide (81,000) is lower than that for COVID (319,000), but again this is due to the fact that we have a very effective treatment for overdoses (Narcan) that has been used by tens of thousands times to prevent deaths in the past year.
Now that the vaccine is launched and we can see the light at the end of the COVID tunnel, the fentanyl crisis and the impact it has on the nation should be given more attention.