Yes, again I'll speak a little from my context working as a public health physician in British Columbia.
We are dealing with two declared public health emergencies. The opioid crisis was declared a public health emergency in April 2016, so it's been going on for about four and half years. Of course the COVID pandemic is the second. We have seen a really tragic interplay between the two, especially during the early months of the pandemic when here in British Columbia we went into lockdown. Many of the services available to people who use substances were either stopped for a period of time or reduced in terms of harm reduction services, access to overdose prevention sites, things like that. Combined with increasingly toxic street drug supply, laced with very strong variants of fentanyl, carfentanil and other even non-therapeutic substances like etizolam, people who even use recreationally can potentially die from an opioid overdose. Therefore, we have seen numbers over the time of the pandemic of overdose events and deaths that far exceed what we have been seeing over the last couple of years.
We were making some inroads into reducing the number of deaths of all British Columbians, including first nations people, but because of the pandemic and the unintended consequences, we are seeing an increased number of deaths. I think we're on track to have the highest number of deaths due to opioid overdoses in British Columbia this year, including for first nations people, and we currently have a higher number of deaths due to overdose than we do to COVID-19.
We find ourselves struggling to try to keep up with responding to both at the same time.