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Every day in Orange, Osceola and Seminole counties, one person dies from a opioid overdose. A report out Wednesday looking at state, federal and local data from Project Opioid found overdose deaths from opioids continue to increase in Central Florida – even after pandemic restrictions began to loosen. In Florida, opioid deaths from April 2020 to April 2021 increased 26 percent compared with the prior year. The rate increased 28 percent in Orange, Osceola and Seminole counties: 616 death in one year between the three counties, or 1.5 per day. Project Opioid founder Andrae Bailey says the pandemic accelerated the real problem: the synthetic opioid fentanyl flooding the markets. (Aboraya, 12/3)

About a month before 18-year-old Madison Workman died of a fentanyl overdose, she told her mom, Amber DelVechio, she wanted to get into a substance use treatment program that used suboxone. This sort of program, called medication-assisted treatment (MAT), was new to the family. Workman had been in a recovery program before, but it was abstinence-only and it hadn’t helped the teenager stop using drugs for very long. Her mom was skeptical. “I felt like it was taking one drug and replacing it with something else,” DelVechio remembered. Still, she told her daughter she’d look into it. DelVechio began researching. She read up and spoke with her daughter’s counselors from the other program. (Donnelly-DeRoven, 12/3)

One of the largest allocations for substance use disorder treatment in the recently enacted state budget — $10 million — is going to a new nonprofit set up by a church in Robeson County, home to one of the most powerful Republicans in the state senate. The nonprofit, called Hope Alive Inc., is a ministry of Greater Hope International Church in Lumberton. Its lead pastor, Ron Barnes, told his congregation during a Sunday service on Nov. 21, which was live streamed on Facebook, that Hope Alive received a grant to open an “82-bed drug addiction rehab facility.” There’s no evidence on the six-year-old church’s website to suggest it has experience in treating addiction disorders, and the church failed to respond to multiple media requests for details of the nonprofit’s plans. (Knopf, 12/6)

The Maryland Department of Health’s website is offline because of a network security incident that law enforcement is looking into, according to a state official. Andy Owen, a spokesperson for the health department, said the Maryland Operations Center is investigating the security incident. He said the health department, Maryland Department of Information Technology and Maryland Department of Emergency Management “are working closely with federal and state law enforcement partners to address the incident and to gather additional information.” (Griffith, 12/5)

With more than two-thirds of Iowa's initial $195 million federal appropriation for COVID-19-related rent and utility assistance unspent after nearly 10 months, the state agency responsible for distributing the aid says it has received no word about whether it will have to give any of it back.The U.S. Treasury last month said it will reallocate unspent portions of the funds, which Congress sent to states last winter, to areas with aid backlogs. But it didn't specify which states will be affected by the clawback. (Rood, 12/5)

Utah had some explaining to do about why it put just one fifth of the $150 million in federal emergency rental assistance it received into the hands of needy renters by a fall deadline set by the U.S. Department of the Treasury. On Nov. 15 the state was forced to send a “Program Improvement Plan” to the Treasury to show how it intends to do a better job disbursing aid. If it’s not happy with Utah’s plan, the Treasury could potentially hand the tens of millions that the state didn’t spend to another agency. (Peterson, 12/5)