A record expert said that over ninety-three thousand people died from drug overdoses in the United States last year. The rate was partly triggered because of the isolation that many people experienced during COVID-19-related lockdowns. On Wednesday, the government reported that the 2020 total number simply beat the last record of around seventy-two thousand deaths in 2019.

Overdose deaths soared to a record 93,000 last year in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, the U.S. government reported Wednesday. That estimate far eclipses the high of about 72,000 drug overdose deaths reached the previous year and amounts to a 29% … https://t.co/iWgMiTLabw

— ABC Columbia (@abc_columbia) July 14, 2021

A Brown University public health researcher who tracks overdose trends, Brandon Marshall, told the Associated Press that it is an overwhelming loss of human life. Moreover, he said that the U.S. already faced an overdose outbreak, but the coronavirus pandemic considerably worsened the crisis. Along with the isolation, several resources of help for drug addicts were not available during the restriction’s duration.

Is Fentanyl played any role in overdose deaths?

A health policy expert at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in Baltimore, Dr. Joshua M. Sharfstein, said that several drug programs were not able to operate during the coronavirus pandemic wave. Street-level outreach was challenging because people were isolated. Health experts say that while drug painkillers once play a crucial role in the United States drug overdose deaths. Heroin and then in last some years fentanyl (a dangerously influential opioid) proved exceptionally deadly.

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control & Prevention

(CDC) said that its research show fentanyl was responsible for over sixty percent of overdose deaths in 2020. One of the ninety-three thousand Americans was Jordan McGlashen of Ypsilanti, Michigan, who died on 6th May of fentanyl and heroin overdose. His younger brother, Collin McGlashen, said that it was really difficult for him to think about the reason for his brother’s death. He was alone and suffering emotionally.

Addicts used fentanyl increasingly while mixing it with other drugs. The CDC reports that last year drug overdoses increased in every state of the country but South Dakota and New Hampshire. States with the biggest surges in overdose deaths were Vermont, up 57.6 percent; followed by Kentucky, up fifty-four percent; South Carolina, up fifty-two percent; West Virginia, approximately fifty percent; and California, up forty-six percent. At present, the United States is experiencing more overdose deaths than deaths from coronavirus.

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