'The world doesn’t care': Homeless deaths spiked during pandemic in US, not from COVID. From drugs.

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‘The world doesn’t care’: Homeless deaths spiked during pandemic in US, not from COVID. From drugs​

Homeless deaths in the U.S. spiked during the first two years of the pandemic. But in some areas, not a single death was attributed to the virus itself.​

May. 28 2022
LOS ANGELES – It happened nine different times.

Sometimes it would be after spotting someone shooting up heroin and suddenly losing consciousness. In others, it would be after shouts in the dead of night that someone was dying of an overdose.

Each time, Fredrick Mitchel, 58, pulled out Narcan, the medicine that can undo an opioid overdose, and tried to save a life.

“I’ve watched the breath of life return to people,” said Mitchel, who has struggled with drug use himself. “People don’t realize what is happening and sometimes it feels like the world doesn’t care. It’s traumatic.”

Mitchel is still haunted by the friends and neighbors living on the streets of Skid Row who he couldn’t save, those who died during the COVID-19 pandemic – not from the deadly virus, but from drug overdoses. Many drugs were likely laced with fentanyl, the potent opioid that fueled a record number of overdoses in the U.S. last year, according to federal data released earlier this month.
In L.A. County, nearly 2,000 unhoused individuals died during the first year of the pandemic in 2020, an increase of 56% from 2019. Of those, 715 were from drug overdoses.

L.A. was not alone. Those experiencing homelessness have been dying in greater numbers across the nation throughout the pandemic, reaching new highs in several U.S. cities, according to a USA TODAY review of data in 10 U.S. cities and counties with some of the highest numbers of unhoused individuals. And drugs, not the virus’ deadly impacts, are largely to blame, the data shows.

“This hasn’t gotten better. It’s only getting worse,” Bobby Watts, CEO of the National Health Care for the Homeless Council, said of the rising number of overdoses from opioids. “To see people living on the streets, living in these conditions, then to see them dying like this when we live in such a wealthy country; it wounds the soul of our nation.”

Drug overdoses play outsized role in homeless deaths across U.S.​

Throughout the country, homeless deaths spiked during the first two years of the pandemic. But in some areas, not a single death was attributed to the virus itself.

San Francisco saw more than twice as many homeless people die in the first year of the pandemic compared to the four years before. About 54% of these deaths were from drug overdoses – a proportion that hadn’t been seen in previous years. Not a single death was from COVID-19

A similar trend erupted in Portland and the Seattle area.

In 2021, the second year of the pandemic, at least 71 homeless deaths in the Seattle area were from overdoses, a number public health officials said had never been so high.

A record 126 homeless people died in Multnomah County, Oregon’s most populous county that includes Portland. Methamphetamines were a factor in nearly half of the deaths, a record since officials began tracking homeless deaths a decade ago. No deaths were attributed to COVID-19.

Christopher Madson-Yamasaki was among those deaths.

The 26-year-old’s mother, Hope Yamasaki, said her son had struggled to find help before he was found dead in February 2020 in a tent.

Yamasaki said her son, who was diagnosed with schizoaffective disorder – a chronic condition in which someone experiences symptoms of schizophrenia and disorders such as depression – spent years going in and out of programs.

“I can’t even count. We went back and forth to in-patient,” Yamasaki said. “He was kicked out of rehab because of mental health problems and kicked out of mental health programs because of drugs.”

'The world doesn’t care': Homeless deaths spiked during pandemic, not from COVID. From drugs.

Homeless deaths are spiking. Fentanyl, a potent opioid that fueled a record number of overdoses in the U.S. last year, is a likely culprit.

www.usatoday.com