Lewis County Coroner Warren McLeod
While COVID-19-related expenses have not directly impacted the Lewis County Coroner’s Office, a simultaneous increase in suicides and drug overdoses is causing Lewis County to brainstorm for funding solutions.
“Even though we’re in phase 3 at this point, there’s still all these regulations that are in place because of COVID and it’s having a dramatic effect on people. It’s having a dramatic effect on their lives,” Commissioner Bobby Jackson said. “It would not be hard for us to make that leap … considering the numbers you had last year. It would not be hard for us to say these things are related to COVID because it has changed everything.”
Lewis County Coroner Warren McLeod, in a meeting with the Lewis County Board of Commissioners on Tuesday, reported that between March 1 and early this week, Lewis County has had 13 drug overdoses. Last month, he told The Chronicle that in the same time frame in 2018 and 2019 there was only one in each year.
Ten of the overdoses have been confirmed as methamphetamine overdoses, and two more are pending toxicology, but are also expected to be methamphetamine related, McLeod said. One overdose was due to heroin.
McLeod said that, in his opinion, the overdoses are not typical, and noted that law enforcement believed methamphetamine with a higher purity could be circulating.
“These are people who have a job, who have families, who have ties, who are active in the community every day and they’re ranging from age 30 up to 72,” he said.
So far in 2020, Lewis County has had 12 suicides, up from five in the same time period in 2019 and three in 2018.
“The spike in cases overall means the staff are working longer on cases that are more complex,” he said.
McLeod also noted that his office has responded to 15 deaths of people under 35 so far this year.
He noted that the majority of his staff are classified as “casual” employees, rather than full time workers and told the commissioners he needs four full time and one part time employee to adequately staff the office, especially in light of the recent spike in calls.
“I want to make sure everybody knows the staff is working long hours and enduring emotional trauma while being held at the status of casual help, meaning they are conducting professional death investigations and maintaining national certifications while being paid barely above minimum wage with no benefits,” he said. “This is yet another example of how unsustainable it is to require the office, the only one in the county, to be staffed by employees classified as casual help.”
County Commissioners Bobby Jackson and Edna Fund both asked McLeod Tuesday if any of the additional expenses his office is facing could be tied to COVID-19 in a way that would allow the county to use some of its relief funding to help.
The exponential increase in overdoses and suicides at the same time as a pandemic, economic shutdown and stay-at-home orders may seem like a clear cause-and-effect relationship, but McLeod said he could not definitively make that call.
“In all honesty, we have not been able to readily identify if COVID has had any direct effect on our office, on our call volume,” McLeod said. “There’s no way I can tie in drug overdoses, the increase in drug overdoses, the increase in suicides directly to COVID.”
He previously told The Chronicle that while three county residents have died from COVID-19, none of them died inside the county. He said Tuesday that his office has conducted COVID-19 tests on 11 decedents, none of which came back positive. McLeod said Tuesday that the Coroner’s Office wasn’t incurring any cost from the COVID-19 testing.
County Budget Manager Becky Butler said she has been in talks with other Washington counties’ financial offices and the Washington State Association of Counties for guidance on spending COVID relief funding.
