alcohol, drugs helped drive excess mortality during pandemic: statistics canada

alcohol and drug use killed more people during the pandemic in alberta and across canada, new statistics canada data show.  

the agency’s report on excess mortality, released thursday, revealed there were two distinct bulges in the number of deaths each week in 2022: an uptick in the curve at the start of the year, when omicron was the dominant covid-19 variant and driven by ontario and quebec, and another in the spring that was attributed to the three westernmost provinces.  

“in fact, alberta and british columbia had higher than expected weekly deaths through much of 2022,” the report states in its executive summary. and elsewhere, “excess deaths were observed across all age groups but were relatively higher among those younger than 45 and among men, particularly in the western provinces.”  

nationwide, there were 2,357 excess deaths from the middle of april 2022 to the middle of may 2022, or 8.4 per cent more deaths than expected.  

in alberta, with the exception of one notable dip in the first week of april, more deaths were reported than were expected throughout 2022. that included a peak of 736 deaths reported the week of feb. 5, when just 574 deaths were expected.  

and while most excess mortality was caused by covid-19, those spikes, in turn, were driven by deaths connected to alcohol and drugs, including cancer and accidental overdoses.  

accidental poisonings killed more young people than old people in 2020 and 2021, with 2,640 individuals in canada aged 45 or younger perishing in this manner in 2020 and 3,600 in 2021. meanwhile, just 580 folks 65 or older died in the same way.  

in alberta in 2020, 1,080 people died as a result of accidental poisonings and exposure to noxious substances, second in the nation only to ontario’s 2,472. these include “poisoning from various illicit drugs, prescription and over-the-counter medications, alcohol, as well as solvents and pesticides.”  

no surprises for er doc 

dr. louis francescutti, a university of alberta researcher and royal alexandra hospital emergency physician, isn’t surprised by the data. he said alberta and b.c. historically have higher consumption rates for alcohol and other drugs than other provinces.  

“and cannabis, too, there are more cannabis stores out there than grocery stores now,” he said friday. “we’ve been talking about it for two years. the pandemic exacerbated the underlying problems.”  

francescutti said he sees people on a daily, even hourly, basis presenting with various substance abuse issues. but “there’s not enough beds. ”

“i bet a lot of these deaths are people we turned away from emergency,” he said. “so you turn them around and you put them back in the situation which causes the drinking.”  

he added he can’t prove it, but the trends appear to bear out what he and his colleagues are seeing “in the trenches,” which includes more than 9,000 individuals experiencing homelessness presenting at the royal alex’s er each year.  

francescutti points to the alberta government’s pivot to a recovery-based model and the new “bridge healing” transitional housing units for people who present at hospital and don’t have a home to return to when they’re discharged. premier danielle smith and reporters toured new units thursday.  

“if they do everything they say they’re going to do, i’ll be able to put (patients presenting with a substance abuse problem) in a bed — then,” he said. “if someone shows up having a heart attack, i don’t say, ‘come back next week.’”  

a couple of qualifiers from the crown agency: the data is considered provisional, since reporting delays and the omission of yukon numbers mean what is presented can’t be based on all deaths that happened during what they call the reporting period. and of course, the context of covid-19 causing its own level of loss of life means it’s more difficult to describe excess mortality in a pandemic year than it would have been in 2018, for example.