Former DHHR Secretary Bill Crouch

PARKERSBURG — Overdose deaths in West Virginia are trending downward and there’s a correlation with the hopefully waning days of the pandemic, according to a state health official on Wednesday.

The Office of Drug Control Policy in the West Virginia Department of Health and Human Resources on Wednesday reported an improvement in the number of monthly deaths from April to September of 2021, which it said follows provisional data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

“There’s a clear correlation in regard to the pandemic and the isolation and the inability to access support services for folks who have SUD (Substance Abuse Disorder),” said DHHR Secretary Bill Crouch during the governor’s press briefing on the pandemic Wednesday morning.

The Office of Drug Control Policy has pushed hard for new programs and support services to combat the problem, he said. Overdoses in 2017 were on the rise in West Virginia, highest in the nation. Yet they went down in 2018 and 2019 by 35% as more help was made available, Crouch said.

“Then this pandemic hit,” Crouch said. “And we ended up with a lot of folks who lost those contacts, lost those resources, lost a lot of the support mechanisms they needed to tackle this.”

State officials are “cautiously optimistic” the pandemic has passed “and we can again push out more programs and try to get this disease under control,” he said.

Gov. Jim Justice also was optimistic on Wednesday, pointing to the County Alert System map with no red, orange or gold counties and only five counties in yellow, the map’s second-safest category. All other counties are green, the map’s safest category.

“We’re really, really getting out of this,” Justice said.

The support mission of the National Guard in hospitals and other health care facilities will end on March 11, Justice said. Nearly 350 Guardsmen were assigned to 38 facilities in positions so medical staff can emphasize patient care.

“On March 11, we will complete this mission,” he said.

Justice also pointed to the revenue surpluses, low unemployment and President Joe Biden’s State of the Union speech on Tuesday. Justice said the president’s delivery was good, but “the substance was not very good.”

The war in Ukraine would have been stopped in its tracks if America didn’t rely on foreign energy, he said.