Professor Gordon Wishart

Lockdown and cancer: are we getting the full story?

(Getty images)

The 10 Downing Street press conferences on Covid-19 tend not to show graphs about cancer care. We see various charts by statisticians and epidemiologists, but the impact of lockdown on patients with time critical conditions such as cancer has been largely ignored. The disruption of cancer services is a global phenomenon, but the suspension of screening services and failure to protect cancer services in the UK has resulted in 40,000 less cancers being diagnosed last year, compared to 2019.

The true scale of the cancer backlog has yet to be acknowledged by the UK government, far less prioritised with specific additional funding. Denial could cost lives. Any future cancer strategy simply has to start with an acknowledgement of what has just happened, which came on top of pretty poor pre-pandemic cancer services.

Covid kills. But so does cancer

A report by Cancer Research UK last year, looking at pre-pandemic figures, showed the UK had worse survival rates than many Western countries due to inadequate early cancer detection and a lack of access to optimal treatment. Add to this a shortage of cancer treatment specialists and we see the official target – treating 85 per cent of cancer patients within 62 days of urgent GP referral – has been missed every year since 2014. This system will soon be asked to cope with people whose cancer should have been diagnosed during lockdown, but was not.

There are already reports of an increase in patients with later-stage cancers due to delays in diagnosis and, not only will this be devastating for these patients and their families, it will further reduce our mediocre survival rates. It is unthinkable that the small incremental gains that have been made by optimisation to screening, diagnosis and treatment of common cancers during my career have been negated by lockdown.

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