‘Staggering loss’: Overdose deaths spike in US during pandemic

The US was already fighting a serious opioid epidemic; the pandemic exacerbated the crisis, new statistics show.

Overdose deaths soared to a record 93,000 last year amid the COVID-19 pandemic, the United States government reported on Wednesday. That estimate far eclipses the high of about 72,000 drug overdose deaths reached the previous year and amounts to a 29 percent increase. “This is a staggering loss of human life,” Brandon Marshall, a Brown University public health researcher who tracks overdose trends, told the Associated Press.