Decrease In Opioid Overdose Deaths In Will County Last Year

WILL COUNTY, IL — Will County has seen a decrease in opioid overdose deaths over the past year, said Kathleen Burke, Will County’s director of substance use initiative, when she delivered her annual report to the Will County Board’s Public Health & Safety Committee last week.

According to the report, there were 96 deaths from heroin, fentanyl and prescription opioids last year, down almost 22 percent since 2019 when 123 deaths were recorded. The coronavirus pandemic worsened people's struggle with substance abuse and so Burke said, this decrease in the county is "an anomaly" compared to trends around the country.

"I'm not quite sure why that happened," she said.

One reason for this, she said, could be the increase in availability of naloxone, which is used to reverse opioid overdose. She said thanks to federal pandemic relief funds, she was able to purchase more doses of this medicine to distribute throughout the county, so residents could use it in if an overdose occurred.

The number of nonfatal opioid overdoses was up by 35 percent last year, according to Burke’s report. This means the efforts to distribute naloxone worked, and she attributed the success to her Rapid Response Naloxone Team which has several locations around the county.

Burke said that stopping in -person treatments due to the pandemic had a "significant impact" on those dealing with an addiction as a change in their routine can be especially difficult and virtual meetings might not prove to be very effective. She said virtual treatment is "not for everybody."

The report also showed that the majority of those who died last year due to overdose were between the ages of 27 and 47. About 82 percent of those who died in Will County last year were white and about 16 percent of them were Black.

Mostly men died of overdoses, about 80 percent of them, which went up since 2019 when 71 percent had died. Joliet saw the most number of opioid deaths — 28 percent — followed by Bolingbrook.

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