How many of those overdoses are due to the economic or personal impact of COVID-19?

A lot of people have lost their jobs, made homeless, or had their loved ones die due to COVID-19, and many more are incredibly stressed out and hopeless from the news and their lack of prospects in the future.

Depression and other mental health issues were already bad enough before the pandemic, but now they're even more prevalent.

Depression can lead people to seek escape from their misery with opioids, and can lead others to want to end their lives with them.. often the two impulses are related, with depressed people engaging in behavior which at the surface might seem pleasure-seeking but underneath is actually self-destructive.

I have a hard time believing COVID-19 and many of these overdoses are unrelated.

Perhaps partly, but the 70% increase from 2018 to 2019 can't be explained by Covid-19.

Behind the clickbait:

"Last year, 441 people died of drug overdoses — a 70% increase from 2018" "621 people died of drug overdoses in San Francisco so far this year"

"fentanyl... more potent than morphine" "2,610 potential overdoses were prevented by Narcan, a medication commonly sprayed up the nose to reverse an opioid overdose"

Serious question: why do you consider the headline to be ClickBait?

Genuine answer: Because the article has no substantial information about Covid-19.

“ A record 621 people died of drug overdoses in San Francisco so far this year, a staggering number that far outpaces the 173 deaths from COVID-19 the city has seen thus far.”

What part of this contradicts the title?

It's irrelevant to every other sentence in the article.

The article is not about Covid-19 at all. The article is about a three year trend in drug overdoses. Covid-19 is not mentioned anywhere else: just a half-sentence insinuation that it is relevant, one that couldn't be evidenced - not even with one quote from any single medical professional (if it could be, it would be).

Why is Covid-19 in the headline? Only so that exactly this happens. That's the clickbait; you fell for it.

Totally agree.

When something goes against the Covid narrative... no matter how scientifically and statistically accurate.. the Covid restriction proponents call it click bait or claim it's spreading false information.

One is not allowed to rationally consider alternatives to the prevailing narrative that flattening the curve and Corona virus restrictions were effective and a good solution while putting millions into poverty was unfortunate but necessary.

Gotta crack some eggs to make an omelet the saying goes and these deaths are possibly the eggs that got cracked to support Corona restrictions.

Sure it was the restrictions and not the deaths and illness and insecurity. That makes sense.

This is clearly an outlier, probably owing to the fact that many covid cases from "inside" the city end up dying in hospitals in the surrounding region (SF itself is only about 12% of the population of the bay area).

Nationwide, overdose fatalities are absolutely on an upswing and worth worrying about. Nonetheless a quick google pulls up this coverage of some CDC data:

https://jamanetwork.com/channels/health-forum/fullarticle/27...

... that shows national fatalities of 75k in a 1 year period. That's about one fifth of the covid death rate of ~400k/year

Really? For a whole year period? That seems shockingly high.

It makes me wonder why we haven't been spending anything close to 1/5 as much time and effort on ~~fighting~~ treating opioid abuse as we have on covid. Especially since we've been grappling with it for so long, the societal effects have been so visible and acute, and we do have some workable treatments for addiction.

I guess it's not like the federal government tried very hard with covid either, to be fair. But those numbers are incredible.

For one thing, drug abuse is not communicable. For another, COVID is indeed significantly more deadly than drug overdoses.

But the actual answer is that the UE has spent far more money and resources into fighting drugs than it has COVID. The majority of police resources goes towards fighting drugs. The majority of prison resources goes towards fighting drugs. Unlike COVID, where at most people have been sternly asked to quarantine, hundreds of thousands of people are locked up and have almost all their freedoms taken away for drugs. There is an entire massive federal agency that only exists to deal with drugs, and has counterparts in nearly every state.

The problem is not a lack of resources vs say COVID. We have been putting orders of magnitudes more resources towards drugs in the US for decades than we have in this one year for COVID.

The problem is that a very large majority of society is unwilling to treat drugs as the health problem that they are and want to test it as a criminal issue. We are now seeing some movement towards treating it as a health issue, now that white families are affected the same way as black families have been for decades, but the change is still far too slow and is largely unofficial.

So the question that we should be asking is not why we are not putting in more resources towards drugs as COVID (simply because we are). The question is why we aren’t putting the bulk of the massive resources we spend on drugs towards the health aspects as opposed to trying to criminalize it out of society.

Okay, I guess we could start sending SWAT teams to throw quarantine violators in prison; that does seem like an apt analogy for the war on drugs.

But I should have said "treating" instead of "fighting". Hurting someone in retaliation for doing something should never be seen as a viable treatment option; that's just punishment for the sake of punishment.

I wish that Americans didn't enjoy hurting other people so much. It makes it hard and even a little bit traumatizing to live here on a day-to-day and year-to-year basis.

It's depressingly hard to get politicians to invest in solving problems that can be waved away as moral failure on the part of the victims.

Yep. Most people do not know the primary cause of drug abuse is AvPD, which, like covid, is not within the control of the drug abuser. In theory a therapist and support group can help, but unlike going to the hospital, one has to choose to grow and improve to get help from a therapist.

One of the symptoms of AvPD is the avoidance of this kind of growth, making it an unfortunate and challenging problem. Going to a therapist isn't enough. There needs to be a cultural change, so that we all know (including those suffering) that there is a way out.

Is there really a solution to the problem? SF has lots of programs for those who want help, many don't.

There is litigation that might reduce the problem at the source: https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2019/10/15/7615373...

Agreed on the need to treat those already addicted.

You can't draw attention to it. That might raise even more questions about the net effectiveness of continued lockdowns.

> It makes me wonder why we haven't been spending anything close to 1/5 as much time and effort on fighting opioid abuse as we have on covid.

If you think opioid abuse is bad, wait until you know the amount of deaths from obesity or smoking.

> More than 480,000 deaths annually (including deaths from secondhand smoke)

https://www.cdc.gov/tobacco/data_statistics/fact_sheets/heal...

> Obesity is associated with nearly 1 in 5 US deaths, according to a study published online August 15 in the American Journal of Public Health. The new data suggest obesity's toll on Americans is more than 3 times previous estimates.

https://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/809516

All preventable causes of death that apparently we must be ok with!

What's the lockdown equivalent?

Is it "not caring" if I don't lock anyone above 200lbs in a room and starve them until they're a healthy weight?

The health care system is built with capacity to handle obesity and smoking related illnesses. It is not built with the capacity to handle covid on top of that.

Additionally, a pandemic and the measures to stop it is a temporary situation. If we could end obesity, opiod abuse, or car crashes by making drastic societal changes that only lasted for a couple months, I'd argue that we should do that. The equivalent actions to stop other high-mortality trends would be permanent changes to society.

We had a year now to beef up our health care system. I guess it’s just easier to take away human rights?

Wait, are you suggesting that more infection of a novel virus (whose family is known for more fatality and lingering effects) is an acceptable trade-off for temporary freedom from masks and limits on gathering?

Assuming that ones hostipals could handle the worst case scenarios.

There are people for whom liberty is an absolute and there is litterally nothing that justifies curtailing it. For a sizable population the entire moral supremacy of the United States is that it is a place that they feel uniquely safeguards it.

I have no dog in this fight as I don’t live there, but I see it as a theme in enough comments and threads that I’m surprised some Americans seem so oblivious to the perspective of their fellow countrymen.

> it is a place that they feel uniquely safeguards it

This isn't news, just read de Tocqueville.

As an American I'm comforted by the idea that a significant part of my compatriots will resist any order by virtue of being ordered.

Treat other people like humans with dignity that must be persuaded instead of commanded. That's the American ideal imo.

That's not the way America treats other people around the world.

Hence why they're referred to as ideals.

No one lives up to them as a consequence of being human.

That doesn't invalidate them.

> the measures to stop it is a temporary situation

Lockdown advocates are arguing authoritarianism is how we get zero deaths.

I don’t care to entertain authoritarianism on a “temporary basis.”

The thing is, authoritarianism justifies itself with tons of utopian excuses like:

Zero crime

Zero poverty

Zero hunger

Zero obesity

Zero sin

It is wrong to pretend that lockdown isn't effective. No man is an island with respect to communicable diseases.

Instead, we decided that this health issue is an ideological struggle of authoritarianism versus liberty, or democrats versus conservative, instead of working together to solve this problem so that we can return to normalcy ASAP.

It's pretty embarrassing that China had got the disease beaten, while we're still struggling with COVID-19.

> It is wrong to pretend that lockdown isn't effective.

If they were effective, why do graphs show seasonality predominates?

There's yet to be conclusive scientific evidence of the effectiveness of lockdowns.

No where in the 2006 Bush plan does it even mention something akin to lockdown - there's mention of quarantine and isolation under police power but that's about it.

Surely the medical community and govt would have written about something like that beforehand?

> It's pretty embarrassing that China had got the disease beaten, while we're still struggling with COVID-19.

Why are they spending billions as part of their campaign to control narratives through means of propaganda, etc.?

> If they were effective, why do graphs show seasonality predominates?

That doesn't follow. Growth prior to the initial lockdowns was expoenential with a doubling rate between 5-7 days. Had this been ineffective we'd have all been sick by now and maybe 50-100M people would be dead worldwide.

Clearly "lockdown" (which is a loaded term people tend to use for anything from stay at home orders to simple mask requirements) worked. The question is how well and to what extent the regimes were followed, and by which populations.

> Growth prior to the initial lockdowns was expoenential with a doubling rate between 5-7 days. Had this been ineffective we'd have all been sick by now and maybe 50-100M people would be dead worldwide.

You know this isn't true because practically every local area that suffers an outbreak follows the same curve regardless of how they implement a strategy.

It looks different at larger levels (town, city, state, country, globe) because it's the aggregation of multiple outbreaks.

> You know this isn't true because practically every local area that suffers an outbreak follows the same curve regardless of how they implement a strategy.

That's just laughably wrong. Explain how these are the "same curve"?

https://91-divoc.com/pages/covid-visualization/?chart=countr...

Did you even read what I said? I said local outbreaks all follow the same spread curve.

When aggregated at the country level you're looking at many separate outbreaks superimposed, hence the wide curves.

And that too seems trivially falsifiable. You have something to cite?

It also ignores actual lockdown which brought cases down to 0 in Victoria. Holding up for a month or so already.

Wow; that’s incredibly high. Given the fact that most COVID deaths are among the elderly while overdoses trend younger the “years of life lost” might be very similar between the two.

Is that the right metric? What about grief? People don't mourn more for parents who die in their 50's than in their 80's. I mean, I guess I'm willing to believe that some deaths "matter" more than others as an abstract idea, but I'm always suspicious when people try to cite metrics like this. It sounds more like an attempt to downplay inconvenient facts than a genuine concern for the optimization of human suffering.

And, as that article mentions, the YoY delta is closer to 10%, so about 7500 excess deaths compared to a normal year. The data is from around June if I recall correctly, so it could have gone up or down a bit, but I doubt it would change by an order of magnitude. What's more, as we get the vaccine rolled out, almost all of these deaths are preventable. COVID is a unique event.

That being said, the shocking statistic I remember is when drug overdoses surpassed the COMBINATION of automobile accidents and homicides as a source of mortality. That is the blurb that really got me thinking differently about the scale of the problem.

This was relatively interesting, seemed like misdirected resources until I compared the nationwide statistics.

In San Francisco they have an extreme concentration of poor/homeless and they should focus resources there.

Across the country on average we'll have 4-5x more Covid deaths than drug overdoses.

Edit: Not to imply a false dichotomy, the numbers are clearly related https://www.cdc.gov/media/releases/2020/p1218-overdose-death...

   “The disruption to daily life due to the COVID-19 pandemic has hit those with substance use disorder hard,” said CDC Director Robert Redfield, M.D. “As we continue the fight to end this pandemic, it’s important to not lose sight of different groups being affected in other ways. We need to take care of people suffering from unintended consequences.”

A lot of these drug overdose deaths are COVID deaths, because alcohol and drug abuse has skyrocketed as a direct result of the pandemic.

The last estimate I saw, IIRC, was that the numbers (sans deaths) have tripled in less than a year. And as a former teetotaler with relatively few mental problems who has spent the last six months playing hooky and getting drunk alone at home daily to help cope, with multiple straight friends doing the exact same thing, I'd be inclined to believe that statistic may even be a massive underestimate when you factor for people who don't have a clinical-grade problem yet.

Glad to see that there are more of us like this, I thought I was the only one.

Before the pandemic I did drink, and relatively heavily, but I'm quite young and it was always with or around a highly supportive friend group that would help me if it was a problem.

Since the pandemic I have been drinking more regularly, until recently, where I've started taking low-level illicit substances to help cope with the lack of future prospects and just overwhelming boredom caused by this virus.

My roommate has been in and out of rehab - you’re not the only one.

I think you mean they are lockdown deaths.

So does heart disease, cancer, surely plenty of other reasons.

Why is that a story other than to create controversy over the "it's just a flu" mentality combined with the "degenerate San Francisco" narrative?

It’s a story because it’s a huge public health crisis with comparatively few resources dedicated towards solving it. Hundreds dead, and thousands who would have died if not for Narcan, is a serious emergency that ought to dominate SF political discussions.

I recognize some people invoke this fact for bad reasons, but it’s pretty dangerous to go down the route of ignoring problems because they feed political narratives we don’t like.

I wonder how many narcan uses were for the same person as a another.

I thinks it’s a story trying to highlight: Both covid and overdose deaths are preventable with the right resources, but far, far more resources are going to covid, especially if you consider the resources/preventable death.

It's surprising how many people are asking why it's a story.

It's a story because people's perception is that COVID is a hugely deadly, once in a lifetime disease that justifies wildly extreme measures. Yet, when put in context, it can end up looking less serious than other health problems that are much more familiar to us. That's surprising and thus newsworthy.

This is something critical thinkers have been flagging up all year: the numbers are low. They're especially low compared to predictions but they're low in an absolute sense as well, usually below a host of other regular killers. Many of the headline stats disguise this fact, like the oft quoted "COVID deaths" number that is picking up a lot of people who died of old age because doctors aren't allowed to write that anymore. On death certificates every death must have a cause because if there's a cause it can be fixed. This is an interesting health care industry mentality, that nobody ever dies because everyone dies, instead they died for a fixable reason, but beyond the philosophical questions that poses it also leads to this problem whereby people see the numbers and assume every "COVID death" could have been prevented.

The "it's just a flu" meme comes about because the numbers of excess deaths are in most places so low that this is a pretty reasonable comparison. In America it looks like that isn't the case, but there's some suggestion now that there has been a pretty steady ~1.2% y/o/y increase in deaths for many years now, so we'd expect an "excess death" in the USA of 1.2% anyway. This is unlike in most countries where death rates have been falling, which is why it yields a confused picture.