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One Million Cancer Cases “Missed” During Covid Lockdowns

by Will Jones
4 January 2025 1:00 PM

Nearly a quarter of all new cancer cases – one million globally – may have been missed during the Covid pandemic, a World Health Organisation study has found. The Telegraph has more.

Researchers said lockdown restrictions and pressures on healthcare systems saw diagnoses of the disease drop by 23% globally, suggesting it was not identified in around one million people.

The findings come after experts analysed the results of more than 240 different studies, providing the first comprehensive worldwide assessment of the impact of Covid on cancer care.

The researchers found there had been a 23% drop in the number of cancer diagnoses made after spring 2020, a 39% decline in cancer screening, a 24% drop in diagnostic procedures and a 28% reduction in treatments.

In 2022, approximately 20 million cancer cases were newly diagnosed and 9.7 million people died from the disease worldwide.

Writing in the journal Nature Cancer, the study’s authors said: “Applying this to the estimated number of new cancers diagnosed in 2020, and assuming that the impact was largest during the first three months of the pandemic, about one million cancer cases might have been missed during the pandemic.

“Many factors might have contributed to this finding, including reduced access to health centres because of lockdowns and suspension of non-urgent care at hospitals, patients’ and healthcare workers’ fear of contracting COVID-19 and equipment or medicine shortages due to supply chain disruptions.”

The WHO public health scientists said that although the impact on cancer care from the pandemic was now starting to become clearer, the full toll would not be known for several years. They warned that any subsequent spike in cancer death rates would take longer to show up in data than falls in screening rates and missed cases.

“Disruptions in pathways to diagnosis and treatment could have an impact on survival and ultimately cancer mortality; as such, the full impact of cancer stage shifts (with later cancer diagnoses during the pandemic) may only become evident in future years,” they said.

A previous study by the University of Oxford found there had been a “substantial impact” on cancer screening and diagnoses in the U.K. in 2020 and 2021 caused by the pandemic. It estimated that 18,000 breast, 13,000 colorectal, 10,000 lung, and 21,000 prostate cancer diagnoses were missed from March 2020 to December 2021.

Something doesn’t add up here. If 62,000 cases of just four cancers in the U.K. were missed, there must have been far more than a million globally, as it’s not plausible that the U.K. (with 0.85% of the world population) would have 6.2% of the missing cancer diagnoses (and in just four cancers). Maybe that’s why the University of Warwick’s Prof. Lawrence Young says it’s “likely to be an underestimate”.

Worth reading in full.

Stop Press: Children who were born during lockdown and started school in 2024 are unable to respond to their own names, a new report from four charities – Save the Children, Child Poverty Action Group, the Children’s Rights Alliance for England and the Centre for Young Lives – has found after polling more than 350 reception teachers.

Tags: CancerCOVID-19LockdownLockdown harmsWHOWorld Health Organisation

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