Death rates for drug overdoses, shootings and all other injuries “increased substantially” nationwide during the two decades heading into the COVID-19 pandemic, a study has found.
A team of 17 researchers examined 3,813,894 “external causes” death certificates recorded for adults aged 20 and older from Jan. 1, 1999, to Dec. 31, 2020. Their study was published Monday in JAMA Internal Medicine, and their research was funded by a National Institutes of Health grant.
They found that deaths from suicides, homicides, accidents and undetermined external causes jumped from 65.6 per 100,000 people in 1999 to 103.5 per 100,000 in 2020.
Unintentional poisonings due to drug overdoses and shooting homicides led the way, and made their biggest jumps from 2019 to 2020 during the first year of the pandemic, the study found.
“The rapid increase in deaths due to unintentional poisonings and firearm homicides is a national emergency that requires urgent public health interventions at the local and national levels,” the researchers wrote.
Over the two decades, poisonings surged by 31.18 deaths per 100,000 people amid a spike in synthetic opioid overdoses, the steepest absolute rise in mortality rates, the study found. The increase was highest among men.
Next came an increase of 4.18 deaths per 100,000 people from firearm injuries and an increase of 2.57 deaths per 100,000 people from other injuries that included car accidents and falls.
The research confirms a widening gap that shows Americans “have experienced poorer health and shorter lives than people in other high-income countries” over the past decade, according to an invited commentary published with the findings.
The commentary came from Dr. Sandro Galea of Boston University’s School of Public Health and Dr. Steven H. Woolf of the Department of Family Medicine and Population Health at Virginia Commonwealth University.
“These disturbing findings reinforce the challenges the country faces to return to health in the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic, a daunting task after more than [four] decades of diminishing health gains,” Drs. Galea and Woolf wrote.
Shootings and drug overdoses have confounded therapeutic public health campaigns in the low-income, Black communities where they occur most often, they added.
“The challenge of preventable illness is that it resists those efforts, no matter how lavish our spending,” the doctors wrote.
According to the study, the poisoning death rate increased by a yearly average of 9.1% between 2013 and 2020. The rate of firearm deaths went up by 2.8% annually between 2012 and 2020.
Motor vehicle deaths increased by an average of 1.1% per year between 2010 and 2020 after dropping for decades, the study noted.
The study follows multiple reports showing drug abuse and violent crime have soared since the start of the pandemic. Those reports have fueled calls for increased funding of addiction treatment programs and gun control measures from some lawmakers.
For example, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported last year that the U.S. experienced a record-high 30% increase in drug overdose deaths from 2019 to 2020, driven primarily by the synthetic opioid fentanyl.
The JAMA study shows that drug overdoses have vastly outpaced guns in driving recent declines in U.S. life expectancy, said Keith Humphreys, a Stanford University addiction researcher who tracks the opioid crisis.
“It really puts in perspective how great the opioid crisis is to see it surpassing other causes of death,” said Mr. Humphreys, a psychologist. “The worst of the HIV/AIDS crisis was nowhere near this bad.”
The only solution will be long-term prevention that starts with young people who experienced unprecedented spikes in mental illness during the pandemic, he added.
“It’s hard because of how our politics work, but you have to be thinking of the next person who is going to be affected,” Mr. Humphreys said. “The problem is that we’re more drawn to the crisis than to the discussion of how to prevent future crises.”
• Sean Salai can be reached at ssalai@washingtontimes.com.