The worst check week in months
The worst check week in months
And the role of decampment in public health
This post is in partnership with Changing the Conversation, a project on housing insecurity with Douglas College, for which I am serving as journalist-in-residence.
“How do I know that more people are dying right now than usual?” Sarah Blyth began a tweet on April 20. She gave five reasons:
more severe overdoses than usual
more overdoses than usual
people overdosing on every corner in the Downtown Eastside
people she knows personally are dying more frequently
more people dying posted on social media
And she should know, as the operator of overdose prevention sites through the Overdose Prevention Society. OPS operates a table in the zero-block of East Hastings, outside the DTES Market, and just last year, it moved into its new physical location at 141 East Hastings Street.
The tweet stood in stark opposition to a news release put out by the City of Vancouver just six days prior.
As soon as the encampment began, advocates were warning it would lead to adverse health effects, including death. Less than a week after it started, a study came out that modelled just how deadly decampmens can be.
I covered it in this newsletter already, so I’ll not go into detail, but it projected that continual displacement could be associated with nearly a quarter of all deaths among people who inject drugs and who are unhoused by 2028.
Still, the city persisted in its safety claims.
In an April 14 news release, the city made a number of claims, all of them backed up by data but not all of them backed up by context.
There are some that make sense. Of course there was a decline in fires—according to the same news release, they removed 50 propane tanks from the encampment.
Others are hard to gauge without context. They said there were no stabbings or serious assaults in the area since the previous Wednesday, but they don’t say how many there normally are in a similar timespan. And they claim there are “indications that street-level assaults are trending down,” which is a vague statement that’s hard to fact check. (The VPD’s crime statistics aren’t in yet for April.)
But where it gets into demonstrably misleading territory is the overdoses.
The claims are twofold:
Visits to and overdoses at overdose prevention and supervised consumption sites were consistent with the same period in previous months
Firefighters responded to 27 fewer overdose calls than the week prior and 82 fewer than two weeks prior
You’ll note that the comparison period for those two points are markedly different. One is with the same period the prior month and the other is week-over-week statistics.
Let me show you how overdose statistics play out when measured in weeks.
There’s a clear pattern, and you’ll note that it always seems to peak during the week with the little red arrow at the bottom. That arrow is check week.
It’s long been established that the week in which social assistance checks are handed out see the most overdoses. It’s pretty simple: people get money, they buy drugs, the drugs are poisoned, they overdose.
The graph above refers to weeks as epidemiological weeks, and the week of April 6 was Week 14. Week 12 was check week.
So yes, firefighters responded to fewer overdoses two weeks after check week than on check week.
From a brief glance, firefighters don’t seem to publicly post weekly statistics on the calls they’ve received, but the city did helpfully link to a weekly overdose surveillance report issued by Vancouver Coastal Health to back up the earlier claim about overdoses and attendance at OPSes.
And it’s worth noting what statistics they didn’t include—emergency department visits from overdoses.
The best comparison to draw is from other weeks that are two weeks after check day, since it’s a similar timespan in how long it’s been since many people have gotten a check.
Using that comparison, the week of April 6 is the worst among similar time periods since at least September. In fact, while it’s hard to be precise, as the graph is in a PDF and not interactive and not accompanied by data, it was worse than or as bad as just about every check week between September and January.
But even the data they do include is simply untrue. The number of overdoses at Insite and OPSes were, indeed, consistent with the same time period in March. But it’s well above the same time period in November, December, January and February.
And this brings us to check week, which Blyth, in her tweet at the top of this post, was specifically referring to.
April’s check week was, in terms of overdoses at Insite and OPSes and in terms of overdose presentations at emergency departments, the worst single week since at least September.
What’s impossible to tell, right now, is how much this has to do with the decampment. Overdose rates are also heavily contingent on the quality of the batches of drugs that are out there at any given time.
Blyth is no fan of people living in tents. But a decampment, she says, has to come with some kind of an option.
“Now people are, from what I’m seeing, passed out in the rain, which is terrible,” she said. “Who would not do all the drugs they could in order to pass out in the rain, in the cold and rain. I would, if I was at the point where my housing was a piece of pavement with nothing.”
The city’s news release doesn’t take credit for the reduction in overdose calls; it’s mentioned more as an aside. But it’s easy to see in the statement an implication that things are improving after the decampment, when, at least in the case of overdoses, they clearly aren’t.
And claiming it is, Blyth said, is irresponsible and, for the people who live and work in the Downtown Eastside and who are already traumatized by that experience, “really more traumatizing.”
“Politicians have to understand … that people will always die in these processes, from moving people,” she said.
“It’s destabilizing an already vulnerable community of people who are on the verge of dying.”
A quick apology for the timeliness of this newsletter. I’d intended to post this last week, but then things got so busy, and I just had no time to put out a newsletter. Things have been calming down again, so things should be back to normal.