Lehigh Valley sees huge surge
Virus restrictions compromise addiction recovery in state
When the little girl wants to talk to her mother, she speaks to the white-and-silver urn adorned with angel’s wings.
The girl is 9 and her mother, Britnee Brettman, died from an overdose of fentanyl and morphine just over a year ago.
She and her three siblings — ages 5, 7 and 15 — are being raised by their grandmother in a white farmhouse in a rural part of Berks County. The urn rests on a shelf in their grandmother’s bedroom.
“Mommy had a disease that was incurable,” is how Kiki Williams says she explains things to her granddaughter. Williams said her daughter’s addiction problem began with abuse of painkillers prescribed for a back injury, so she tells the little girl, “The doctor gave her medicine and she took too much.”
Similar heartache is being felt across Pennsylvania and the nation as the opioid-driven drug crisis stages a comeback, in part because of the coronavirus pandemic.
In the absence of recent and reliable state data, The Morning Call collected information on drug deaths from eight county coroners in the Lehigh Valley region.
It showed Brettman was one of 553 people who died of drug overdoses in the eight counties — Lehigh, Northampton, Berks, Bucks, Montgomery, Schuylkill, Monroe and Carbon — in the first six months of 2020. That was increase of more than 19% from 463 in the same period one year earlier.
Fentanyl and meth are playing a significant part in the resurgence.
But people close to the crisis point to COVID-19 disruptions of “recovery” — the fragile journey of staying free of drugs — and shutdowns that began in March, two months after Brett
man died.
U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data supports that observation. Last month, it warned of an “acceleration of the increase of drug overdose deaths” coinciding with widespread COVID-19 mitigation measures.
The agency said the 81,230 drug overdose deaths shown by provisional data for the 12 months that ended in May are “the largest number of drug overdoses for a 12-month period ever recorded.”
No state data
“The isolating nature of the pandemic has been incredibly challenging,” state Secretary of Drug and Alcohol Programs Jennifer Smith told reporters on Dec. 8 during a briefing about the drug crisis.
Smith said “we are losing far too many Pennsylvanians” but gave no data on drug overdose deaths in 2020.
The figures are kept by the state Department of Health. That agency later said no official data was available for 2020 and supplied a color-coded map — based on preliminary data — that indicated whether each county had an increase or decrease in deaths during the first half of 2020.
But the color-coded map showed the wrong color for Lehigh and Schuylkill counties. The map showed deaths had declined, when calls to coroners in those counties proved the opposite was true.
Coroner-supplied figures show a 42% increase in drug overdose deaths in Schuylkill County and a 15% increase in Lehigh County.
Monroe County had a 52% increase and Bucks County a 21% increase. Carbon was the only county among the eight with a decline.
In a response to a Right-to-Know request seeking a breakdown of the data use to create the map, a Health Department spokesperson said, “Finalized death records for overdose deaths are reported to the department by coroners and medical examiners and are often delayed by 3 to 6 months.”
And on Tuesday, the state issued a news release without numbers of drug deaths for 2020, but a statement that from January through July, each month’s total was higher than the corresponding month in 2019.
The Right-to-Know response and statements from staff indicated that when Smith spoke to reporters on Dec. 8 with the color-coded map, the information on the map had last been updated on Oct. 9, two months before the briefing.
Asked why the briefing was done with such outdated figures, a spokesperson at the Health Department — which compiles the death data — said the question would best be directed to Smith’s department, Drug and Alcohol Programs.
A DDAP spokesperson said Smith “was using the information that she had at the time of the press conference. The data that she used was and is compiled by a Department of Health epidemiologist who updates the data and had presented the information at the Administration’s Opioid Command Center.”
The president of the Pennsylvania State Coroners Association, Chuck Kiessling, said members are hampered by massive numbers of COVID-19 deaths, insufficient staff to file reports, and autopsy delays.
Kiessling also said the state also has been slow to upgrade an electronic system that would let coroners report the deaths more quickly.
’You need human touch’
Paintball gear — a gun, a shirt with padded elbows, baggy pants with padded knees was stacked neatly in the corner of Zachary Zerfass’ bedroom on June 14, when his mother went in to wake him up.
Zachary, a Nazareth High School graduate, had traveled the country with his sponsored Wolfpack paintball team and went by the nickname “Gator.”
He was 28, had brown hair and brown eyes, and lived with friends in a Levittown apartment.
The equipment was stacked because Zachary planned a come- back to the game after being side lined as he battled addiction. His mother, Dolores “Dee” Zerfass, had no reason that day to suspect he’d been using drugs, because she believed he had been drugfree for 16 months.
Zachary was in his bed. He didn’t respond when she touched his hand.
Within minutes, Dee Zerfass realized she had lost the youngest of her three sons. Eventually, she learned the cause was fentanyl intoxication.
Zachary had been doing well, she said. As the spring of 2020 approached, he was engaged at his car sales job. He ran recovery meetings and managed a recovery house and bought new paintball gear.
Then COVID-19 hit in March. The dealership closed and recovery meetings went online.
“It’s not the same,” Dee Zerfass said. “All that came to a screeching halt. The dealership shut down and all he had was his head. He was in his own head.”
She thinks that weakened his ability to resist the pull of drugs.
“You need human touch,” she said. “You need human contact. You need to be in the presence of people.”
Overlapping disasters
On March 6 of last year, Gov. Tom Wolf signed a disaster declaration for the COVID-19 pandemic.
Since then, he has renewed the 90-day declaration three times. The state reports on deaths from the crisis nearly every day.
On Jan. 10, 2018, Wolf signed a disaster declaration for the drug crisis and he has renewed the 90-day measure 12 times.
Drug overdose deaths soared in Pennsylvania and the nation between 2014 and 2017 as the prescription painkiller-driven crisis exploded. In Pennsylvania, deaths declined from 2017 to 2018 as government at every level took action.
Officials at the press briefing in December said 4,457 people died of drugs in 2019 in the state.
The map Smith consulted during the briefing showed a preliminary total of 2,352 drug overdose deaths statewide during the first half of 2020, an increase of nearly 12%.
The state noted its figures do not include “drug-related” deaths, such as when someone who uses needles develops a fatal infection, and they do not include drug deaths ruled suicides or homicides.
Many coroners included such deaths in figures given to the newspaper.
Zachary Lysek, the Northampton County coroner, thinks the pandemic may have exacerbated the drug crisis.
“From a mental health standpoint, I think it has affected a lot of people with depression and anxiety about what’s going on,” he said.
Lehigh County Coroner Eric Minnich said he believes the pandemic must have played some role in the increased deaths.
“At some point, isolation has got to get to people. And if they have a history with substance use, they may fall back into the pattern,” Minnich said.
Schuylkill Coroner David Moylan said it is possible part of the surge in deaths in Schuylkill County is tied to coronavirus pandemic shutdowns, but his office has not studied it.
Democratic state Sen. Judy Schwank of Berks County called the overdose situation “extremely disturbing” and said, “We have taken our eye off the ball.”
’Battling your thoughts’
The photo showed Remmy, Lenna Bedoya’s German shorthaired pointer, wearing swim goggles.
It was hilarious. On July 21, Lenna, who lives in Easton, texted it to her brother, Armando Bedoya.
He was 24, an Easton High School graduate who loved snowboarding and had been an instructor at Camelback.
Together, he and Lenna had endured a tragedy. Their only sibling, older brother Luis Bedoya, had died of a fentanyl overdose in 2016.
Lenna got a text response from Armando after he saw the dog in goggles.
He wrote, “She’s so cute.” Those were Armando’s last words to his sister.
About three hours later, their mother called Lenna and said Armando had been admitted to the hospital after an overdose. He died a week later.
Lenna said life has been “extremely hard” since his death. She said, “My brothers were 26 and 24 and had so much more to give.”
COVID-19, she agreed, has complicated Pennsylvania’s other disaster.
Of those who struggle, she said, “You are fighting this fight every day, and battling your thoughts, and you are more likely to turn back to drugs because there is nothing else to do”
Morning Call Capitol correspondent Ford Turner can be reached at fturner@mcall.com.