The opioid epidemic in Virginia cost almost $3.5 billion in 2020, according to a new cost calculator from the Virginia Department of Health (VDH) and the Virginia Commonwealth University. On average, over four Virginians died of an opioid overdose each day in 2020, according to a VDH announcement of the cost calculator.
“This burden is carried by Virginia’s workers, employers, and governments, and includes both future losses and current direct spending that could have been avoided,” the calculator’s site explains. “Virginia families and businesses take on a large amount of these costs, mostly due to lost future worker productivity. Federal, state, and local governments also see increased healthcare and government costs and lost future tax revenues. The cost burden of the opioid epidemic is split among several sectors.”
The calculator separates the costs by both sector and payer. The largest payer category is household with nearly $1.9 billion in costs, followed by $1 billion in costs to the federal government and nearly $565 million in costs to state and local government. By sector, the $3.5 billion caused $2.3 billion in lost labor costs, followed by about $639 million in health care costs and about $520 million in the crime/other category.
The 2020 numbers are substantially higher than an estimate from 2017 which found the total cost across sectors was $2.7 billion, according to a brief from the Center on Society and Health, VDH, and Altarum.
“An uptick in substance-related overdose and death has been overserved nationwide in the wake of the pandemic, so this increase is not entirely surprising, though the scale of the increase is alarming (from 2.7 billion to 3.5 billion). We do expect the costs to remain high in 2021,” Interim Director of the VCU Center on Society and Health Derek Chapman, Ph.D told The Virginia Star.
“It is anticipated that costs are likely to continue increasing moving forward for 2021, as opioid drug overdoses also increased in Virginia as well,” VDH Injury and Violence Prevention Senior Epidemiologist Lauren Yerkes told The Star.
“The staggering costs associated with the opioid crisis in Virginia underscore the value of a comprehensive strategy that combines downstream interventions (e.g., emergency care for overdoses, addiction counseling) with upstream efforts (e.g., economic relief to distressed communities, stronger social services and support systems for those in need) to ease the conditions that fuel drug use,” Chapman said in the release.
Yerkes said the VDH plans to add more recent data. Chapman told The Star that the calculator looks at 2020 because that was the most recent data available at the time of the analysis, and said that the earliest analysis could be completed for 2021 would be the summer of 2023.
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Eric Burk is a reporter at The Virginia Star and The Star News Network. Email tips to [email protected].
