A new study indicates that the opioid crisis is deepening in the US.
A year ago, the US was in the grip of an epidemic – the plague of opioid addiction, with more than 70,000 lives lost in 2019 due to drug overdose, according to the National Institute for Drug Abuse.
The topic has been the focus of debates on public health, academia and politics.
But it is soon overshadowed by a new threat – the COVID-19 pandemic.
In a large-diameter study published in JAMA Psychiatry on February 3, which analyzed nearly 190 million visits to emergency services (ED), researchers found a significantly higher number of visits to EDs for opioid overdose during the months of March to October 2020, compared to the same dates in 2019. The study found that the weekly rates of ED visits for overdose drugs increased by 45% from mid-April compared to the same period in 2019.
Overall visits to ED for opioid overdose increased by 28.8% year-on-year.
While some survived this overdose, many others were not so happy.
“The increase in overdose deaths is worrying,” said Deb Houry, MD, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)’s National Center for Injury Prevention, about the rising dose of deaths during a COVID 19-pandemic.
The CDC said in December that the death rate during the pandemic accelerated, driven by synthetic opioids, which rose by 38.4% during the year to June 2020.
Overdoses of opioids do not exist in a vacuum; rather, any force that threatens mental health makes society more susceptible to the threat of addiction. For some people, this power may be the fear of contracting COVID-19. For others, the stress of losing a job. And yet another, the boredom of being trapped in your home without doing anything.
“The disruption of daily life due to the COVID-19 pandemic has hit those with drug use disorder hard,” said the former CDC director, Dr. Robert Redfield, said in December.
This same JAMA psychiatry study found that the emergency department’s visits to mental health conditions, intimate partner violence, and child abuse and neglect increased during the same period as suicide attempts.
Although many lives were saved with home stay orders, these savings were not free. Although vaccines appear to have shed light at the end of this COVID-19 tunnel, America will have to face its growing problem of social isolation and mental illness in the age of the internet, experts say.
“Social distance has forced many 12 Step programs, such as Alcoholics Anonymous, to stop their meetings. The need for effective treatment for drug abuse has never been so great,” said Linville M. Meadows, MD, a physician and author said about addictions.
Nicholas Nissen, MD, is a clinical fellow in psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and an ABC News medical unit.