The U.K. Office for National Statistics (ONS) has revealed that more people than ever before lost their lives to alcohol in the year of the COVID-19 pandemic. In 2020, there were 8,974 deaths (14.0 per 100,000 people) from alcohol-specific causes. This represents a 18.6 percent increase compared with 2019 and this represents the highest year-on-year increase since records began.
In wider context, the figure is unsurprising in relation to a January 2022 report issued by Public Health England (PHE). This reveals that back in 2019/20, the UK’s National Health Service (NHS) was hit hard with nearly 1 million alcohol-related hospital admissions. This stands as a 4 percent rise on 2018/19.
Furthermore, alcohol-related hospital admissions in 2019/20 represented 5.7 percent of all hospital admissions. Behind this, with demographics, almost three quarters of all people admitted into hospital because of alcohol were male (73 percent). This tallies with the finding that twice as many men as women died from alcohol in 2020.
Taking the data review a step further, alcohol addiction treatment experts UKAT analysed the recent PHE and ONS data, showing that rising regional hospital admissions back in 2019 did not prevent the rising alcohol death rates in 2020.
Nuno Albuquerque, Consultant Treatment Lead for the UK Addiction Treatment Group tells Digital Journal: “What we would have hoped to have seen is that as more people are admitted into hospital with alcohol-related conditions, they would have received both short-term and long-term medical and therapeutic help and support that would hopefully prevent their alcoholism from worsening.”
This is not, however, what happened. As Albuquerque points out: “What we’re seeing is that hasn’t necessarily been the case for most regions across the country. In fact, more people lost their lives to alcohol even though they’d not long engaged with the NHS. This suggests to us that sometimes, a more powerful intervention style of treatment is needed.”
There are also geographical issues. For example, taking the West Midlands (central England) in 2019/20, 112,560 people were admitted into hospitals with alcohol-related conditions. This was 5 percent more than the previous year. The 2020 alcohol-specific death toll rose from 12.1 to 16.1 deaths per 100,000 people, an annual increase of 33.1 percent.
Similar upward trends were seen in South West England and in the North West. Concerningly, from a social policy perspective, the alcohol-specific death toll in the North West was upward despite the region prescribing the most amount of prescription drugs to combat alcoholism in the country. The region dispensed 33,000 items in 2019/20 including Acamprosate Calcium, a medication that is used for the maintenance of abstinence of alcoholism.
The rates described should be worrying for Johnson’s government and a sign that additional funding is needed to support the NHS and related health services.
