The Centers for Disease Control and Preventionreleased a provisional count for 2022’s death toll on Wednesday, estimating that 109,680 people died from drug overdoses throughout the year. While the total is slightly higher than 2021’s death toll of 109,179, it also indicates overdose deaths are no longer surging in the U.S. and have reached a plateau.

Overdose deaths skyrocketed throughout the Covid-19 pandemic, rising from 71,000 in 2019 to more than 90,000 in 2020, and then eclipsing 100,000 for the first time in 2021.

An article published in The New York Times estimated that the six-figure death toll is another sign that the nation’s efforts to repair damage from an increasingly complex and deadly drug overdose are still far from completing.

Drug overdoses led to a decline in life expectancy in the United States and are one of the leading causes of death in the country.

Since the 1970s, the number of individuals who died from this drug overdose has been surging.

Sharp increases in 2020 and 2021 “were mostly driven by the availability of fentanyl in many parts of the country,” explained Dr. Wilson M. Compton, deputy director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse.

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