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Comment by loosetypes | Hacker News Reader

> San Francisco had four times as many deaths from overdose this year as it did from the COVID-19 virus.

Wow.

We had the lowest Covid-19 death rate (per capita) of any major city in the US so far. The next lowest was Seattle which was 3x higher due to some bad luck with early spread but still low compared to the national norm. Most cities have substantially higher Covid-19 death rates.

That is more-or-less the case in all developed countries, it's just not talked about.

(My friend works in addictions here in BC, Canada)

My estimate is that in the US COVID-19 will cause roughly 3X the number of drug overdose deaths this year. The drug overdose deaths from 2018 are about 67K, as reported by the CDC [0]. The US is at about 240K COVID-19 deaths, increasing about 1K/day. Of course, the US mortality from COVID-19 is an exception wrt other developed countries.

[0] https://www.cdc.gov/drugoverdose/data/statedeaths.html

That's not true in the US- CDC statistics are ~72000 OD deaths for 2019. The worst numbers I've seen are a 50% increase in OD deaths, so we can probably expect the 2020 numbers to come in at 105,000 or less. There are 220,000 COVID-19 deaths nationwide in the US so far.

Horrible numbers eithier way, but there has NOT 4x the number of deaths from drug overdose in the US compared to COVID-19.

I was intrigued by this statement, and, while it is true for San Francisco in particular, it is (despite rapid increases in recent years) unlikely to be even true for the US as a whole, let alone for other developed country. In fact, in the US alone, more people died of COVID-19 this year than died in the entire world of overdoses in 2017: https://ourworldindata.org/drug-use#deaths-from-substance-us...

Switzerland, for instance, is on track for 3000+ COVID-19 deaths and is unlikely to exceed 150 overdose deaths.

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