Data shows drug overdoses soaring following virus lockdowns: Up 18% in March, 29% in April, 42% in May

“We’ve literally run out of wheeled carts to put them on,” coroner Anahi Ortiz of Columbus, Ohio, said about the overdoses in her area, which saw as many as nine deaths in a 36-hour period.

Similar numbers have emerged out of Roanoke County, Virginia, where police say they have responded to double the number of fatal overdoses the last few months as they did all of last year. In Kentucky, several towns are seeing increases in overdose deaths.

In Milwaukee, Wisconsin, overdoses have increased more than 50%, according to a federal initiative that gathers ambulance data.

“Nationwide, federal and local officials are reporting alarming spikes in drug overdoses — a hidden epidemic within the coronavirus pandemic,” the Washington Post article reads. “Emerging evidence suggests that the continued isolation, economic devastation and disruptions to the drug trade in recent months are fueling the surge.”

A study conducted by Just Facts concluded that anxiety and stress caused by the coronavirus lockdown will destroy seven times the number of lives that the lockdowns are alleged to have saved.

“It’s when you feel alone, stigmatized and hopeless that you are most vulnerable and at risk,” Robert Ashford, who runs a recovery center in Philadelphia and is in recovery himself, told the Washington Post. “So much of addiction has nothing to do with the substance itself. It has to do with pain or distress or needs that aren’t being met.”

One of the strictest coronavirus lockdowns was imposed by Democratic Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer. It was in Michigan where Steven Manzo, a 33-year-old bar employee in Mount Clemens who was recovering from heroin addiction, lost his job just before St. Patrick’s Day.

“Everything looks normal, but it doesn’t feel normal,” Manzo ominously told a Washington Post reporter on March 20. “I live downtown with bars and restaurants and nobody is here. We have no idea how long it will be.”

Two weeks after making those comments, Manzo was found dead in his department of a drug overdose.

“He was clean for eight years,” Manzo’s mother said. “He would always tell me, ‘My trigger is depression. That is my trigger.’ If he had still been working, he would have been able to fight that urge, because he was busy. He loved that job. He loved people.”

Sandy Rivera, an emergency medical technician in Union City, New Jersey, told the Washington Post she saw a noticeable change in the types of cases her ambulance was responding to in May, shifting from respiratory illnesses to nearly half of her cases being overdoses and suicide attempts.

“One night, that’s all I had,” Rivera said, adding that she tended to a patient who consumed an entire bottle of Tylenol and another took medication that belonged to her children.

“They were cries for help,” she said.

A Kaiser Family Foundation study showed that at least 45% of adults believe the virus has negatively affected their mental and physical health and, some medical professionals have told news outlets that suicides are on the rise and lockdowns should be ended.

Six-hundred doctors signed a letter to President Trump in late May referring to the coronavirus lockdowns as a “mass casualty incident” and urged him to do what he could to ease them.

Lockdowns and restrictions are still in effect in several areas of the country, including in the nation’s largest state of California. Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom announced this week he is closing bars and restaurants just two weeks after allowing them to reopen, citing a rise in coronavirus cases that some believe are largely the result of increased testing over the past several weeks.