Correct!
“ The synthetic and highly addictive drug has claimed more lives than COVID-19, auto crashes, gun violence, cancer and suicide in the year 2020.”
https://www.abc12.com/news/fentanyl-number-one-cause-of-deat...
“ The synthetic and highly addictive drug has claimed more lives than COVID-19, auto crashes, gun violence, cancer and suicide in the year 2020.”
https://www.abc12.com/news/fentanyl-number-one-cause-of-deat...
Edit: The reporting in this article is remarkably bad: it confuses a two-year range (Jan-2020 to Dec-2021) with a one-year range, and itself contains a number that's nowhere near the number of COVID deaths:
> The drug has taken just shy of 80,000 people's lives between January 2020 and December 2021.
[1]: https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/pressroom/nchs_press_releases/2021/...
[2]: https://www.webmd.com/lung/news/20211122/us-covid-deaths-202...
All these media reports were all influenced by this underlying factsheet from FAF.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1S0szR2Ua9v0Sr91YhDD7gPrXsDk...
Broadly, it appears true: fentanyl deaths look like they outweigh all those things in the younger population. And it doesn't look implausible that synthetic opioids could have killed a total of 64k across the entire population in 2021. (I think they were comparing trailing-twelve-month data from two dates in each case..)
edit, 3mins: I was distracted and my previous version of this reply was word salad.
The CDC's death count with age breakdowns[1] shows that over twice as many people aged 18-64 died of COVID-19 than drug overdoes, combined across 2020 and 2021. That flips when you limit it to just 18-45, which is the statistic FAF is using.
[1]: https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid_weekly/index.htm#Se...
You know, people need an anchor point for comparison very often.
"Holy shit COVID and car crashes are bad, and among younger adults -- believe it or not-- fentanyl is even worse".
Which disregards that X may be a new source of increased deaths, not to mention that when X == COVID, the methods needed to mitigate the risk are antithetical to a mindset of "it's no big deal" because that mindset pushes back against taking even some minimal precuations.
So, anchoring can help people understand the magnitude of something, but at the same time convey a misunderstanding, or short-circuit reasoning as well.
This is precisely why it is a common sales tactic: Go into a jewelry store asking for a nice watch as a present, and you may be shown a $3k watch. Way over your budget, so when you ask to be shown a something else a $700 watch seems like a much better deal, even if it might still be a bit more than you wanted to spend. Maybe the third watch will be an ugly one for $400 to help convince you that you need to spend more, putting both an upper & lower bound on the purchase.
I don't think anyone has said, "fentanyl is worse for 18-44, therefore COVID is no big deal".
I think the message taken was "two sources of premature death shot way up, passing traffic accidents and suicide, which we all know are really bad in that age group". And maybe "wow, fentanyl is even bigger than COVID as a cause of death among young adults".
It doesn't make me take traffic safety less seriously, either.
Look, I ain't got time each year to compute loss-of-life expectancy numbers, and decide how preventable each and every cause is, and then come up with an analytical ranking of each cause and its "importance" (I did this at one point, but I'm not going to repeat it to understand trends).
I don't work in public health, either. Approximation based on reasonable anchor points and understood risks is just fine.
My intent was to make a general statement about anchoring as a technique. But in any case, you're incorrect: my own father has made this sort of remark about opioids, and I've seen it pop up in message boards, and with other (not necessarily opioid) comparisons by folks who resist masks/social distancing/vaccination.
I've never heard the "no big deal" one. I've heard another: If responses to COVID have worsened the opioid crisis, that's a cost that should be counted against COVID mitigation measures.
(I still think this is faulty: I don't think responses to COVID have done much to change the opioid crisis. But at least this is a rational argument and open to debate).
Heck, at the very beginning people saying that sort of thing by comparison to the flu. That line of thinking went away when deaths far exceeded annual flu deaths, but with the (possible) decrease in severe cases with Omicron I've seen hints of this argument again.
Well, at some point, it's a reasonable argument. Risk isn't going to go to 0. It looks like with vaccination my personal risk is 2-3x influenza, but I may be overstating it.
At some point, we're going to just have to give up and assume risks. I'm not routinely wearing masks 3 years from now.
Another confounding variable are testing rates: Mandatory testing is in place to a significant degree more than last year, so it is difficult to tell how many more positive tests this year are simply due to mandatory testing. For example, they're required for air travel and about 3x more people traveled this year for the holidays. This is speculation though: Relevant data would be at least in part include asymptomatic case rates from year to year, but I couldn't find a good source for that. Information like [0] are very promising but still indicate that it's too early to tell.
[0] https://www.reuters.com/business/healthcare-pharmaceuticals/...
>At some point, we're going to just have to give up and assume risks. I'm not routinely wearing masks 3 years from now.
Mostly agreed, though as variants come & go I won't be surprised if some variants create "mask seasons" as they rise & fall. In retrospect even pre-covid it seems odd that it was deemed acceptable to go into work when you were sick with a cold or flu-- not necessarily even for severe health risks, but just as a matter of common courtesy. Of course changing that behavior in the long term would also require society (again, I'm in the US) to rethink things like what constitutes a reasonable amount of paid sick time. That is an especially problematic area when workplaces mandate 5/10/14 days of isolation but don't cover it with paid leave. My workplace does not cover that time if an employee is already out of paid sick leave. In the past, when going in to work when you were sick was somewhat optional, that made a little more sense. Now, telling someone they're losing 4% of their annual income due to a mandatory 14 day isolation period w/o pay is... I'm not sure I have a good word for it, but it feels wrong.
Also lots of families getting together had agreed to get themselves tested before hand.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
And if this sales tactic would be applied to any security issue you can more or less forget about civil liberties.
The framing is relevant since the increase is arguably a product of the lockdown/social isolation. Generally it's not Boomers or the upperclass who are having to deal with opiate addiction. Is it a coincidence that their needs once again supersede the needs of others? Maybe
Funny use of the word 'synthetic' to add extra spookiness. Something like 60% of first-world medicines are natural origin or secondary metabolites of natural origin - the other 40% are all synthetic. [1]
[1] https://www.spandidos-publications.com/10.3892/br.2017.909
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opioid#Semisynthetic_and_synth...
I am not a doctor: Of the very powerful "powder" drugs heroin is the safest as it has very little effect on the involuntary respiratory system which is the route that opiates take to kill. "Nodding off" on synthetic opiates leads commonly to death (which is why you always prod a sleeping junky - wake up!!) but not so much on heroin.
But it is much safer to smoke opium, if you wish to have such a habit. Much less chance of death and disease.
So, you cruel, nay, sadistic lawmakers: Legalise opium!
But people popping pills are nearly invisible and die quietly - people smoking opium fill up establishments, make funny smells and do not conveniently die off in the corner.....
Natural opioids: codeine, morphine.
Semi-synthetic opioids: heroin, hydromorphone, hydrocodone, oxycodone, etc.
Synthetic opioids: methadone (though this is usually excluded from the reporting of "synthetic opioid overdose deaths" for various reasons), demerol, fentanyl, lots of -fentanyl analogs, etc.
If opiate deaths are a problem, tobacco ones are a 7x larger problem.
https://api.politifact.com/factchecks/2021/dec/23/facebook-p...
To be clear, this is false. Fentanyl overdoses (according to that article) have killed about 80,000 people in a year in the US whereas COVID-19 has killed more than 386,000. It's nowhere close. And that is not to mention all of the people COVID-19 has permanently disabled.
I know the article has some quantifiers elsewhere that could be used to form a true statement if included. But as stated, that is false and it's being used to mislead people into think COVID-19 isn't that serious.
[2] Most fentanyl (+ precursors) is manufactured in China and then comes across the southern border from Mexico.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/jan/28/fda-janet-wo...
[2] (PDF) https://www.dea.gov/sites/default/files/2020-03/DEA_GOV_DIR-...
The article appears to attribute all accidental poisoning to fentanyl. That seems like an error.
I don't think it does. Sure, they throw out the 100k overdoses number at the end, which isn't specific to fentanyl, but the other numbers they cite are around 40k/year and a run rate of 64k/year by Deceber 2021.
Current data is here:
https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/drug-overdose-data.htm
It's about 62k deaths from synthetic opioids/year (excluding methadone) at the end of the series-- the vast majority of these are fentanyl. Plus a bunch of heroin deaths which are rapidly becoming "really fentanyl" deaths. And that's up to April, not December.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1S0szR2Ua9v0Sr91YhDD7gPrXsDk...
Topic 1 is on ages 18-45: more deaths from fentanyl than from...
The later topics are on all ages.
The fact sheet attributes 24k deaths in the age range to fentanyl in 2019. WISQARS accidental injuries from poisoning in the age range were 38k in 2019. 2/3rds in that age range being fentanyl is totally plausible.
https://wonder.cdc.gov/controller/datarequest/D157;jsessioni... has the broken down data. They have 36,907 deaths in 2020 from 18-45 with T40.4-- "other synthetic opioids excluding methadone". FAF is calling all deaths from synthetic opioids fentanyl, which isn't quite true but it's very likely close to true.