It didn’t look good for the teenage driver. Shortly after 7:15 a.m. on a rainy Thursday in May last year, the young man — who lost control of his yellow sports car when it hydroplaned on Saw Mill Run Boulevard and he slammed the vehicle into a utility pole near
Isolation, anxiety, stress and the fear of contracting COVID-19 created barriers to treatment, according to addiction experts.
Hard-hit communities across the U.S. hope to combat the rising number of fatal overdoses as the nation reached a morbid milestone in the drug epidemic: Drug overdose deaths soared to a record 93,000 in 2020, according to provisional data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
That marks a 29.4% increase from 2019.
In Allegheny County, Pennsylvania, home to Pittsburgh, the rate of overdose deaths noticeably surpassed Keystone State’s rate, which 16% to 5,172.
The county’s chief medical examiner reported drug overdoses increased 22% from 2019 to 689 fatalities. Opioids were involved in 92% of the county’s accidental overdose deaths in the first and second quarter of 2020, on average, according to the Allegheny County Department of Health and Human Services.