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Comment by bsamuels | Hacker News Reader

San Francisco has the second highest overdose rate in the US behind Harris County. Please be more careful when sharing information.

https://www.sfchronicle.com/projects/2021/san-francisco-drug...

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That article only looks at 10 counties: "Of the 10 places we examined, San Francisco had the second highest overdose rate in 2020 after Harris County, which contains the city of Houston."

If you look at more data, you see that even in California (https://www.countyhealthrankings.org/app/california/2021/mea...), SF is not at the top (Lake, Mendocino and Inyo rank higher). I'm not saying drug use is not a problem in SF. I'm just saying it's not the primary reason why we have a big homeless problem.

That said, compare with Ohio (https://www.countyhealthrankings.org/app/ohio/2021/measure/f...) where there are dozens of counties that more than double SF's overdose rate. And still, their homelessness rate is a fraction of California's.

looks like there must be some serious differences in methodology between these 2 sources.

sfchronicle has the overdose death rate for:

SF at 61 per 100k

Humboldt at 31 per 100k

Cited from Cali Dept of public health

CountryHealthRankings has:

SF at 23 per 100k

Humboldt at 32 per 100k

It's possible, I haven't looked into the details. But so far I'm yet to see a national study that puts SF anywhere near the top. It's just more visible because addicts are on the street, compared to other metros.

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