Coronavirus Crisis Disrupts Treatment for Another Epidemic: Addiction

Crazy Times! Drugs Can Kill! –

August 2, 2020 – And that has left people who have another potentially deadly disease — addiction — with fewer opportunities for treatment, while threatening to reverse their recovery gains.

“It’s hard to underestimate the effects of the pandemic on the community with opioid use disorder,” said Dr. Caleb Alexander, a professor of epidemiology and medicine at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. “The pandemic has profoundly disrupted the drug markets. Normally that would drive more people to treatment. Yet treatment is harder to come by.” Drug rehabs aren’t as much of a COVID “tinderbox” as nursing homes, Alexander said, but both are communal settings where social distancing can be difficult.

Shared spaces, double-occupancy bedrooms and group therapy are common in rehabs. People struggling with addiction are generally younger than nursing home residents, but both populations are vulnerable because they’re more likely to suffer from other health conditions, such as diabetes or cardiovascular disease, that leave them at risk of succumbing to COVID-19.