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.