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The acting head of the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy said Thursday that drug deaths spiked dramatically during the pandemic, up roughly 27% compared with the previous year. "We lost 88,000 people in the 12-month period ending in August 2020," Regina LaBelle told reporters during a morning briefing. "Illicitly manufactured fentanyl and synthetic opioids are the primary drivers of this increase." (Mann, 4/1)

[Acting director of the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy, Regina] LeBelle also revealed a plan designed by the Biden administration to help address "the overdose and addiction crisis" during its first year, saying that "new data suggest that COVID-19 has exacerbated the epidemic." (Gonzalez, 4/1)

The pandemic's negative impact on the mental health of millions of people has renewed discussions around why that nation's behavioral healthcare system has been inadequate to meet the level demand for care. But the failure to meet patients' mental health needs predated the pandemic. Approximately 43% of the more than 51 million adults estimated to have had a mental health condition in 2019 received treatment, according to care access data compiled by Mental Health America. (Johnson, 4/1)

At first, the thermometer read 101. But when Ricardo Ramirez arrived in the emergency department it just kept rising. He began pleading for his life, begging the fully gowned, gloved, and masked strangers to give him something to stop it. And then, on March 23, 2020, a few hours after he arrived, it hit Ramirez all at once: he was sure he was going to die. (Rios, 4/1)

Between one-third and one-half of American employees worked in person throughout the pandemic, with or without a say in the matter, and some at great personal risk. Most of the rest of us were forced to work from home, also without necessarily wanting to. And in fact, almost two-thirds of people in a poll last fall felt that the cons of working from home outweighed the pros, and nearly a third said they had considered quitting their jobs since being banned from the workplace. In another poll, about 70 percent said that mixing work and other responsibilities had become a source of stress, and about three in four American workers in the early days of the pandemic confessed to being “burned out.” (Brooks, 4/1)

When Alex Alvarado and his co-founders started their virtual therapy company Daybreak Health in February 2020, they saw a “massive need” for better mental health options for teens. Then the pandemic hit, and the gap they were trying to fill grew even bigger. “The need has really obviously skyrocketed in this population, as well as the need for technology-based solutions,” he said. “So it was fortunate for us to be able to help as many kids as we have been during this time.” (Aguilar, 4/2)