MESSAGE
| DATE | 2020-08-22 |
| FROM | Ruben Safir
|
| SUBJECT | Subject: [Hangout - NYLXS] WUHAN-19 Costs
|
Opinion | Counting the Cost of Britain’s Lockdown
The Editorial Board
3-4 minutes
A Breast Screening Unit at Telford Hospital in Birmingham, U.K.
Photo: Nick Potts/Zuma Press
Public-health experts will spend years quantifying the full effects of
coronavirus lockdowns, but early efforts already point to significant
health costs around the world. The latest is a study warning that
Britain may pay a high price in cancer deaths for the United Kingdom’s
war against the pandemic.
The suspension of cancer screening during the pandemic and delays in
further testing and treatment have probably erased years of improvements
in survival rates, the London-based Institute for Public Policy Research
wrote this week. Britons missed more than 200,000 cancer screenings each
week of the lockdown, and backlogs remain.
The five-year survival rate for lung cancer may drop to 15.4% from 16.2%
in 2017 (the most recent data). For breast cancer the rate could decline
to 83.5% from 85%, and for colorectal cancer to 56.1% from 58.4%. You
have to go back to 2016 (lung), 2011 (breast) and 2009 (colorectal) to
encounter survival rates that low.
Britain will not be alone in discovering such unintended health
consequences. But it’s a notable case because the U.K. was lagging the
rest of the developed world in cancer outcomes before the pandemic. Late
diagnosis is a chronic failure in the socialized National Health
Service. The pandemic made a bad situation worse by forcing officials to
ration care from potential cancer patients more aggressively.
The IPPR is a progressive think tank and its report argues for more
money for the NHS to treat cancer and a pandemic at the same time.
Politicians will pick up that refrain. But it’s more accurate to note
that state-run medicine created a system that already failed large
numbers of cancer patients, and then had no choice but to fail even more
when confronted with an unusual event.
American voters, take note. The virus undoubtedly has had a negative
effect on treatment for cancer and other serious diseases in the U.S.,
but starting from a position of consistently better patient outcomes.
Would Bernie Sanders’s Medicare for All or Joe Biden’s Medicare for More
be as resilient?
Journal Editorial Report: Paul Gigot interviews Johns Hopkins Dr. Marty
Makary. Image: Reuers/Dado Ruvic
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