5 ms·

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 itse

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/2772241 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

meekrohprocess 6y ago
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.
- macintux 6y ago
  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.
  - proverbialbunny 6y ago
    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.
  - aeternum 6y ago
    Is there really a solution to the problem? SF has lots of programs for those who want help, many don't.
- gnusty_gnurc 6y ago
  > 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/health_effects/tobacco_related_mortality/index.htm 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 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?
  - notatoad 6y ago
    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.
    - gnusty_gnurc 6y ago
      > 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
      - kiba 6y ago
        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.
- wildsatchmo 6y ago
  You can't draw attention to it. That might raise even more questions about the net effectiveness of continued lockdowns.
- addicted 6y ago
  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.
  - meekrohprocess 6y ago
    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.
- Tempest1981 6y ago
  There is litigation that might reduce the problem at the source: https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2019/10/15/761537367/your-guide-to-the-massive-and-massively-complex-opioid-litigation https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2019/10/15/7615373... Agreed on the need to treat those already addicted.
bitcurious 6y ago
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.
- newacct583 6y ago
  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.
topkai22 6y ago
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.

meekrohprocess 6y ago

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.

macintux 6y ago
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.
- proverbialbunny 6y ago
  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.
- aeternum 6y ago
  Is there really a solution to the problem? SF has lots of programs for those who want help, many don't.
gnusty_gnurc 6y ago
> 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/health_effects/tobacco_related_mortality/index.htm 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 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?
- notatoad 6y ago
  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.
  - gnusty_gnurc 6y ago
    > 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
    - kiba 6y ago
      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.
wildsatchmo 6y ago
You can't draw attention to it. That might raise even more questions about the net effectiveness of continued lockdowns.
addicted 6y ago
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.
- meekrohprocess 6y ago
  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.
Tempest1981 6y ago
There is litigation that might reduce the problem at the source: https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2019/10/15/761537367/your-guide-to-the-massive-and-massively-complex-opioid-litigation https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2019/10/15/7615373... Agreed on the need to treat those already addicted.

bitcurious 6y ago

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.

newacct583 6y ago
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.

topkai22 6y ago

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.