‘More overdoses in ER than Covid’
Dr. Colfax: 'I don't think I diagnosed a single Covid case' the past few nights
While the tide of Covid-19 has receded dramatically in recent weeks, a local emergency room doctor reports that the surge in overdose deaths shows no signs of abating so far.
“I just came off (working) a block of nights, and I don't think I diagnosed a single Covid case,” said ER physician Drew Colfax, who works at Adventist Health Ukiah Valley. “There are much more Fentanyl overdoses in the ER these days than Covid cases; that's really what we should probably be talking about every other week.”
Colfax has been giving regular dispatches on the state of the pandemic for Mendocino County Public Broadcasting on a show co-hosted by KZYX&Z's Alicia Bales, and this week he said while Covid-19 seems to be loosening its grip, he doesn't see the same happening with opioids.
“It's really quite astonishing how many near-fatal overdoses we're seeing in the ER,” Colfax said during his latest Local Coronavirus Update March 15.
“Almost every day we have somebody come in who overdosed on an opiate and required NARCAN, and had to be brought back from death or near-death.”
Colfax described the surge in overdose deaths that he was seeing as “increasing pretty dramatically for about the length of the pandemic, and it is still surging.” When asked by Bales how that surge was related to Covid-19, he said, “everybody's under a lot of stress, and people are searching for ways to relieve it, which has led to a significant increase in drug use.
And Fentanyl is “very cheap and widely distributed,” Colfax continued. “I don't think there's a high schooler in this county who doesn't know how to get narcotics at their school.”
Colfax went on to guess that many counties have had actually “more deaths from overdoses than from Covid” during the pandemic. When asked about the specific ratio in Mendocino County, Colfax said he guessed it was “about the same: we've had 124 deaths from Covid in the past two years, and I suspect that our opiate overdoses are close to that.”
When asked earlier this year for the number of overdoses the Mendocino County Coroner's Office had recorded in the past few years, Mendocino County Sheriff's Office spokesman Capt. Greg Van Patten reported numbers that had more than doubled in the past four years.
In 2018, the Mendocino County Sheriff/Coroner's Office recorded 25 accidental drug overdose deaths; in 2019, the number was 32; in 2020, the number jumped to 52, and in 2021, the number was 57.
When asked how the surge in overdoses could be successfully addressed, Colfax said, “California in particular is trying, and there is much more attention being given now to narcotic abuse and the mortality associated with it, but there is still a lot of stupidity around it. (For example), there is a very good treatment for opiate use disorder, there's medication you can take that's quite safe, suboxone, but, idiotically, as a prescriber, I still need a special waiver to be able to prescribe it. I need to go through a bunch of special paperwork, which is just bureaucratic baloney, to be able to prescribe this very safe, and very effective, medication.”
Colfax said that another confounding aspect to opioid use is that “it tends to start early in life, and it's also associated with homelessness, and the housing crisis. So, any efforts to try and treat people on the back side are really too late. So the question of trying to stamp out narcotic overdoses is not the right question: the question should be, ‘how are we going to get people housed in this county and this state, and then talk about treating opiate use disorder.'”
As far as Covid is concerned, Colfax said the upcoming “spring and the summer should be fairly benign, Covid-wise.” So much so, in fact, that Colfax said it might be time to pause his regular radio updates.
When Bales asked, “how likely is it that we will have another surge or variant?” Coflax said there was “no doubt we will have more variants. What is uncertain is whether those variants will be sufficiently contagious, and whether they will evade the immune response that over 90 percent of us now have in this country, either by previously contracting it or having been vaccinated,” or a combination of the two.
And while Colfax also said he believed it was time for people to start accepting some of the risks associated with Covid-19, just as they have accepted the risks associated with driving, he did not think it was quite time yet for people to stop wearing masks in public, and would have preferred to see mask mandates remain in place a little longer.