Circumstances surrounding opioid toxicity deaths within shelters in Ontario, Canada, before and during the COVID-19 pandemic: a population-based descriptive cross-sectional study
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Introduction: Evidence suggests growing opioid-related toxicity deaths within shelters that has been exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic. We sought to characterise opioid-related toxicity deaths within Ontario shelters before and during the pandemic. Methods: A descriptive cross-sectional study of people who died of an accidental opioid toxicity, where the location of the incident (ie, toxicity) was within a shelter in Ontario, Canada, was conducted. The primary analysis was restricted to conventional shelter spaces as classified by the coroner (ie, excluding temporary COVID-19 emergency shelters in hotels). Characteristics, circumstances surrounding death and patterns of healthcare use preceding death in the pre-pandemic period (1 January 2018-16 March 2020) and the COVID-19 pandemic period (17 March 2020-31 May 2022) were summarised. Results: Overall, opioid-related toxicity deaths within Ontario shelters more than tripled when comparing the pre-pandemic (n=48) with the pandemic period (n=162). Fentanyl directly contributed to the majority of these deaths, and its role as a direct contributor to death rose during the pandemic (from 85.4% to 94.4%; p=0.04), as did those of any stimulants (from 43.8% to 71.0%; p< 0.001). Moreover, benzodiazepine detection in opioid-related toxicity deaths increased during the pandemic (from 27.1% to 56.8%; p<0.001). In both the pre-pandemic and pandemic periods, more than half of the recorded deaths occurred among people with a diagnosis of an opioid use disorder (59.6% vs 53.5%; p=0.46), and a large percentage of people had a healthcare encounter in the week before death (46.8% vs 43.9%; p=0.73). Conclusions: Opioid-related toxicity deaths within Ontario's shelters have increased rapidly over the study period, with notable changes in the circumstances of death and patterns of non-pharmaceutical opioid involvement during the COVID-19 pandemic period. This study demonstrates the urgent need to expand programme and policy interventions tailored toward harm reduction within Ontario's shelter system.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".