Five years of Covid exacted a terrible toll. Another epidemic has claimed even more lives ‘We lost sight of the fact that more young people were dying from drug overdoses than from Covid’ Manage alerts for this article Email this article

https://www.statnews.com/2025/03/11/covid-5-year-anniversary-compare-pandemic-response-to-opioid-overdose-epidemic/?utm_campaign=morning_rounds&utm_medium=email&_hsenc=p2ANqtz-_80qa26wn6qBkg51TRFiFPmjIa4165tOdE1BDJkQr0X-Xy-lVCKD7JVenuhElOmDSkP5R04jzdyphxckSGvzoEar1CEQ&_hsmi=351081588&utm_content=351081588&utm_source=hs_email In dominating the early 2020s, the Covid-19 pandemic distracted from what could arguably be a more significant public health emergency: Even at the height of the pandemic, more young Americans were dying of drug overdoses than the infectious disease. More than 1.25 million people in the U.S. died from a non-alcohol drug overdose between 1999 — about when the crisis began — and 2024. That puts overdose deaths a tick ahead of overall U.S. deaths from Covid-19, and the gap will surely grow. But the country’s drastically different responses to these two crises shows how relatively little attention people pay to the addiction crisis, STAT’s Lev Facher writes. “When you look at the adoption and spread of vaccination versus the adoption and spread of medications for opioid use disorder, they’re light years apart,” physician Brian Hurley told Lev. Read more from Lev about the contrast between the responses to these two deadly crises.