Editorial: Challenges to Opioid Use Disorders During COVID-19.

COVID‐19 brings an opportunity to learn as well as a responsibility to prevent and treat. As clinical scientists, we must learn from early experience and communicate to the global community as well as adapt local healthcare to emergencies such as the COVID‐19 pandemic. This adaptation to COVID‐19 must include paying attention to pre‐existing medical and mental disorders and understanding the interrelationship of these comorbid disorders in drug‐dependent populations.

As of April 1, the COVID‐19 pandemic has swept over 200 countries with 823 626 confirmed cases and more than 40 598 deaths. During the ongoing outbreak of COVID‐19, persons with opioid use disorders (OUDs), who commonly have pre‐existing mental and physical health problems, are suffering from increased vulnerability to poor health and mental distress.

Opioid dependence is a very common drug use disorder affecting 40.5 million people with a worldwide prevalence of 510 cases per 100 000 people. People with opioid dependence experience significant healthcare disparities, including excess mortality attributed to drug overdoses, suicides, traumatic deaths, and infectious diseases. The medical care for their high physical comorbidity from infectious and chronic diseases is a great public health issue, particularly during this epidemic with its scarcity of medical care.

The individuals with OUD and multiple comorbidities have a high risk of COVID‐19 infection. Moreover, the pandemic control measures including quarantine or isolation, and the scarcity of healthcare resources and staff have greatly strained our most effective treatment for OUD, opioid agonist treatment (OAT) using methadone or buprenorphine. , Delivery of OAT can be problematic in many countries. For OAT patients, these circumstances will lead to drop out and discontinued medication; the subsequent opioid withdrawal can result in relapse to illicit opiate use. , Disruption in access to OAT can be compounded by specific psychological consequences of anxiety and posttraumatic stress disorder due to the sudden outbreak of COVID‐19. These consequences also can include unstable emotion states and relapse to symptoms from previously remitted comorbid psychiatric disorders. These remissions will make patients especially vulnerable to resuming illicit opioid use both to stave off withdrawal and to self‐medicate these comorbid disorders. Another risk is that overdose rates substantially increase after premature treatment cessation. Patients facing premature OAT discontinuation with insufficient methadone or buprenorphine will turn to street drugs to avoid withdrawal, and thereby relapse to OUD. These issues highlight the importance of continuity of treatment for OAT and require the healthcare system and policy makers to ensure sufficient treatment for patients with OAT.

In China, there are currently 889 000 people with OUD, of whom 162 000 receive methadone maintenance treatment (MMT) through 1389 MMT clinics. During the COVID‐19 outbreak, the authorities have made efforts to maintain patients in OAT and MMT. For instance, in Hubei Province, the COVID‐19 epicenter in China, the provincial drug control office established a joint inspection, management and control mechanism for strengthening the screening for all kinds of abused drugs while carrying out the epidemic inspections for COVID‐19 infection. Medical staff from MMTs including MMT clinical doctors, social workers, volunteers, and community workers have jointly worked with 1011 drug rehabilitation communities in conducting door‐to‐door visits and surveys to reach those persons with known OUDs. These visits encourage the OUD persons to take self‐protective measures and keep away from illicit drugs, and screen these patients for suspected COVID‐19 symptoms. For those MMT patients who are located far from their MMT clinics, the authorities have opened green channels and required public security departments to ensure that methadone is delivered from the clinics to these MMT patients. During the epidemic, Huber province has provided 398 drug users with door‐to‐door delivery of their MMT. Moreover, MMT clinics or outpatient services have detailed plans to prevent nosocomial infections by conducting regular disinfection, maintaining sufficient supplies of personal protective equipment (PPE) for staff, screening for COVID‐19 infection for newcomers to MMT and ensuring that MMT program members wear protective masks. At the beginning of the epidemic, MMT clinics healthcare staff also provided PPE to patients who went to the clinic for taking methadone.

People with OUDs require specific consideration in emergency planning and management. The most important issue is to ensure service continuity and accessibility of OAT during the pandemic. While a number of previous disasters provided lessons about barriers and recommendations for maintaining OAT, public health emergencies such as this pandemic of infectious disease have not produced suitable preparedness and actions. Therefore, we suggest that during the ongoing COVID‐19 in worldwide, authorities should make efforts to ensure accessibility and availability of OAT through four critical actions. First, during such a public health emergency, specific staff could be assigned to deliver methadone or other medicines to those patients with difficulties in getting to MMT. Second, the OUD patients confirmed or suspected to have COVID‐19 infection and admitted to the hospital for treatment need a comprehensive treatment plan to address these patients’ mental and physical comorbidities including drug interactions between methadone and their other medications such as anti‐viral agents. Third, sufficient mental health care should be available via telephone, internet or even properly protected face‐to‐face contact for OUD patients who may develop unstable emotional states and other comorbid mental disorders during this sudden outbreak of COVID‐19, especially when implementing ongoing intensive control measures like isolation and travel bans. Fourth, OAT clinics take effective infection control measures such as ensuring enough PPEs for staff, doing epidemiological and clinical screening of patients for COVID‐19 infection and modifying patient flow to maintain safe distances between patients waiting for services. Fifth, more research is needed to identify the challenges to OUD and OAT under circumstance of pandemic or epidemic infectious diseases, and to strengthen emergency preparedness and responses that will guarantee treatments such as MMT are continuously available and thereby prevent individual and public harm.

Declaration of Interest

The authors declare that there are no conflict of interests.