GREEN BAY, Wis. — The COVID-19 pandemic has brought several prolonged issues to the forefront, and drug overdoses are no exception.
Bellin Health Pharmacy Clinical Coordinator Andrew Cohen would like to flip the script when it comes to teaching and talking about opioids.
“I don't want to say opioids don't have risks because they do, but we know more now and are also more responsible,” Cohen said.
Cohen believes a lot of attention has been on encouraging physicians to prescribe fewer opioids, but now the focus needs to shift to illicit use, whether intentional or not.
Wisconsin's opioid epidemic didn't pop up overnight. Statistics from 2015 show the state crime lab had 51 fentanyl cases in 2015. Eventually, that number jumped to 546 cases in 2020, a year dominated by disease.
Brown, Outagamie and Winnebago were among the worst impacted counties in northeast Wisconsin.
There was an upswing in overdoses before the COVID-19 pandemic, according to Cohen, but that quickly turned into a spike.
“We definitely had seen, from a time frame from 2020 to 2021, significant increases in opioid-related overdose deaths,” Cohen said.
According to Cohen, more than two-thirds of opioid-related deaths are now tied to a synthetic drug like fentanyl. That has caused more trips to the emergency room too.
Between January and April of 2020, Bellin Health treated just two patients for an opioid overdose in their emergency department. That figured jumped to 16 between May and August and 19 patients by the end of the year.
As a substance abuse counselor, Alexis Haack has had a front-row seat to the impact of the pandemic.
“I would say the trends that I've seen over the last two years are actually people that have been in programing before,” Haack explained.
With more relapses over the last two years, the waitlist at the Jackie Nitschke Center in Green Bay grew longer than ever before.
“When everything started going back to in-person, like people weren't working from home anymore, that was a moment there was quite an influx because suddenly people weren't able to hide in their homes quite the same way they were able before,” Haack said. “All of a sudden, you have to go back to work, you're seeing family members again, and then it became much more evident that there was a problem again. You couldn't hide it quite the same way.”
Overdose visits to the emergency department at Bellin Health have dropped off, at least for now, but the same can't be said for opioid-related deaths in the region.
“You have a much stronger, more potent opioid that is potentially contributing to deaths and the patients are never showing up in the emergency department with an overdose because they can't make it there,” Cohen said.
Cohen theorizes with fentanyl overdoses tougher to reverse, the outcome is becoming deadlier more often.