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>"Eh, more people die from fentanyl, so X isn't so bad" The increase in deaths is being driven by lockdown/social isolation so it looks more like medical triag

by evv555 5y ago

>"Eh, more people die from fentanyl, so X isn't so bad" The increase in deaths is being driven by lockdown/social isolation so it looks more like medical triage. Who do you save, upperclass/baby boomers who generally don't have these problems or disenfranchised young?

mlyle 5y ago
> The increase in deaths is being driven by lockdown/social isolation so it looks more like medical triage. This is an argument many make, but it's not a really good argument. - Fentanyl deaths were trending up before 2020. - The degree to which fentanyl is lacing other street drugs is unprecedented and seemingly independent of lockdown. - Look, we don't really have "lockdown" anymore.
- evv555 5y ago
  >- Fentanyl deaths were trending up before 2020. They were trending up but there was a very sharp increase once the epidemic started. >- The degree to which fentanyl is lacing other street drugs is unprecedented and seemingly independent of lockdown. There was precedent before 2019. Seemingly independent growth that's also parabolic during 2020? Unlikely >- Look, we don't really have "lockdown" anymore. The genie is out of the bottle once people relapse. Maybe you don't realize how dependent recovering addicts are on rehab programs and social connections to stay clean. For some people giving them a steady unemployment income and forcing them to isolate is basically a death sentence. This was a predicted outcome during the start of the isolation.
  - mlyle 5y ago
    > They were trending up but there was a very sharp increase once the epidemic started. Opioid deaths increased 1014% from 2013 to 2019. This is an average compound growth rate of 46.8% per year over that span. Opioid deaths increased by about 50% from 2019 to 2020. It looks like they increased by less than 40% from 2020 to 2021. So over the past 2 years we have had the same increase rate as from the entire span. The data don't support your assertions.
  - ineedasername 5y ago
    >They were trending up but there was a very sharp increase once the epidemic started. Visualizing the trend, the cause is debatable: extrapolating from the trend that was in place as of March 2020 [0] leads to a similar place we're at now, and we can't know if that would otherwise have levelled off. There was a sharper uptick in April/May, but not a significant variation from the smoother curve that would have fit previous data. >The genie is out of the bottle once people relapse. You would still expect there to be a noticeable decline: Fewer people starting down the addiction pipeline to begin with, more people that are already addicts starting to get the help they need again. There should be a noticeable decline as people reconnect to support services, and we haven't seen that yet. Maybe it's just too early to tell, but social awareness of the opioid crisis was at an all-time high in 2019/early-2020, Rx access to them was already severely limited for the previous few years, and in mid-2019 a trend that had been pretty flat for ~2 years started to significantly increase. I'm sure COVID didn't help, but there was significant upwards pressure before that and disentangling the two is not a straightforward task. https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/drug-overdose-data.htm https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/drug-overdose-data.htm
SuoDuanDao 5y ago
>Who do you save, upperclass/baby boomers who generally don't have these problems or disenfranchised young? I guess we know the answer to that, not that anyone in the latter group had any doubt before we ran the experiment.

by evv555 5y ago

mlyle 5y ago

> The increase in deaths is being driven by lockdown/social isolation so it looks more like medical triage. This is an argument many make, but it's not a really good argument. - Fentanyl deaths were trending up before 2020. - The degree to which fentanyl is lacing other street drugs is unprecedented and seemingly independent of lockdown. - Look, we don't really have "lockdown" anymore.

evv555 5y ago
>- Fentanyl deaths were trending up before 2020. They were trending up but there was a very sharp increase once the epidemic started. >- The degree to which fentanyl is lacing other street drugs is unprecedented and seemingly independent of lockdown. There was precedent before 2019. Seemingly independent growth that's also parabolic during 2020? Unlikely >- Look, we don't really have "lockdown" anymore. The genie is out of the bottle once people relapse. Maybe you don't realize how dependent recovering addicts are on rehab programs and social connections to stay clean. For some people giving them a steady unemployment income and forcing them to isolate is basically a death sentence. This was a predicted outcome during the start of the isolation.
- mlyle 5y ago
  > They were trending up but there was a very sharp increase once the epidemic started. Opioid deaths increased 1014% from 2013 to 2019. This is an average compound growth rate of 46.8% per year over that span. Opioid deaths increased by about 50% from 2019 to 2020. It looks like they increased by less than 40% from 2020 to 2021. So over the past 2 years we have had the same increase rate as from the entire span. The data don't support your assertions.
- ineedasername 5y ago
  >They were trending up but there was a very sharp increase once the epidemic started. Visualizing the trend, the cause is debatable: extrapolating from the trend that was in place as of March 2020 [0] leads to a similar place we're at now, and we can't know if that would otherwise have levelled off. There was a sharper uptick in April/May, but not a significant variation from the smoother curve that would have fit previous data. >The genie is out of the bottle once people relapse. You would still expect there to be a noticeable decline: Fewer people starting down the addiction pipeline to begin with, more people that are already addicts starting to get the help they need again. There should be a noticeable decline as people reconnect to support services, and we haven't seen that yet. Maybe it's just too early to tell, but social awareness of the opioid crisis was at an all-time high in 2019/early-2020, Rx access to them was already severely limited for the previous few years, and in mid-2019 a trend that had been pretty flat for ~2 years started to significantly increase. I'm sure COVID didn't help, but there was significant upwards pressure before that and disentangling the two is not a straightforward task. https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/drug-overdose-data.htm https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/drug-overdose-data.htm

SuoDuanDao 5y ago

>Who do you save, upperclass/baby boomers who generally don't have these problems or disenfranchised young? I guess we know the answer to that, not that anyone in the latter group had any doubt before we ran the experiment.