Two new JAMA studies reveal startling jumps in overdose-related cardiac arrests and fatal opioid overdoses during the COVID-19 pandemic.Record overdose-linked cardiac arrestsThe first study, led by University of California, Los Angeles, researchers and published yesterday in JAMA Psychiatry, involved 33.4 million patient emergency medical services (EMS) encounters from the beginning of the pandemic to May 2020 in the US National EMS Information System, a database of EMS visits from more than 11,000 agencies in 49 states.
These visits made up more than 87% of all EMS encounters in 2020.The number of overdose-related cardiac arrests was compared with those from 2018 and 2019 and with provisional aggregate death data from the Centers for