It was a pandemic within a pandemic, and it was a pandemic within a pandemic. As per the Ohio Capital-Journal, the COVID-19 epidemic intensified its grip in April 2020, and it hasn’t really let up since then. It also marked the start of a year that would have seen 100,000 Americans die from opiate overdoses. That was the highest number since the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention began counting them in 1999, and it represented a 28 percent increase over the previous year, reports Thecourier.com.
When viewed in perspective, the figure is even more impressive. In that year, opioid-related deaths accounted for more than 10% of the 910,000 Individuals who had died as a result of the pandemic.
In April 2020, federal stimulus cheques were distributed to help reduce the economic damage caused by the disaster.
According to a peer-reviewed study commissioned by Dave Yost, Ohio Attorney General, and based on Ohio Department of Health statistics, the stimulus checks and other activities may have had at least one negative side effect.
Yost’s staff and professors at Bowling Green State University collaborated on a paper that was printed in the International Journal of Drug Policy. In a statement introducing the research on Thursday, Yost emphasized the potential harm that the stimulus payments could have produced, a phenomenon called among scholars as to the “check effect.”
In a statement, he stated, “The relationship between epidemic relief money and opiate addiction deaths is now clear.” “The intention was to assist Americans in navigating this lethal pandemic, but it also fostered a tidal wave of overdoses,” says the report.
However, because that link isn’t straight, it’s a bit hypothetical.
The study’s only conclusion was that the inspections may have contributed to the rise in death rates.
Loneliness, unemployment, delayed access to medicine and therapy — and the very real dread of getting sick and dying — were just some of the pressures brought on by the pandemic.
Another option to assess the checks’ influence on the overdose problem is to examine overdose statistics collected when the stimulus checks ceased being distributed in late 2020. However, such figures do not appear to be accessible yet due to lags in the process.
Yost clarified that by making the report public, he was not suggesting that the stimulus funds were a bad idea. In fact, he claimed, they were critical at the time.
