Pandemics have been a natural part of human part of history. While COVID-19 wreaked havoc, there have nevertheless been multiple pandemics that have caused higher death rates and had a higher death toll, whether it was the Spanish Flu (1918-1920), the Black Death (1346-1353), or the Plague of Justinian (541-549). Pandemics are not unprecedented, but the use of lockdowns to isolate the healthy and asymptomatic has been historically unprecedented.
The Lockdown Lovers who advocated to shut down large swathes of the economy were so focused on creating a zero-COVID world. Part of their skewed and one-sided approach was slow down or eliminate the spread of COVID while ignoring all other healthcare costs. If you recall, all "non-emergency" healthcare was suspended in multiple countries. In my May 2020 analysis of why we need to end lockdowns as soon as possible, I explicitly stated that implementing lockdowns meant ignoring non-COVID healthcare at our own risk. While I cited a few studies on the topic, the one that is most relevant here is a study from The Lancet showing that the sharply higher unemployment from the Great Recession caused an excess of 260,000 excess cancer deaths in OECD countries (Maruthappu et al., 2016).
This study from The Lancet is doubly important because we created economic decline with the lockdowns and we made sure to delay various forms of "non-emergency" healthcare. Preventative care comes in many forms, whether that would be cancer screenings (e.g., mammograms, colonoscopies); tests for blood pressure, cholesterol, and diabetes; and counseling on such topics as losing weight, alcohol use, or smoking. The purpose of preventative healthcare is in its name. We have preventative care in order to prevent deadly occurrences that could have been avoided if diagnosed and treated beforehand. The extreme repurposing of healthcare in the name of defeating COVID is now coming home to roost.
A couple of weeks ago, The Lancet released a report entitled European Groundshot - Addressing Europe's Research Challenges: A Lancet Oncology Commission. This report details the impact that the lockdowns have had on cancer-related services in Europe:
"To emphasize the scale of this problem, we estimate that about 1 million cancer diagnoses might have been missed across Europe during the COVID-19 pandemic...There is emerging evidence that a higher proportion of patients are diagnosed with later cancer stages compared with pre-pandemic rates as a result of substantial delays in cancer diagnosis and treatment. This cancer stage shift will continue to stress European cancer systems for years to come. These issues will ultimately compromise survival and contribute to inferior quality of life for many European patients with cancer."
About 1 million cancer diagnoses. Let that number sink in. That is not an insignificant figure by any means. To think that this number only covers Europe. Europe accounts for about 748.7 million out of the 8.001 billion, or about 9.4 percent of the global population. If we assume that the rest of the world has the same rate of missed cancer diagnoses, that would be an estimated global 10.7 million missed cancer diagnoses.
10.7 million missed cancer diagnoses is astounding. First, let us keep in mind what The Lancet report said when this will continue to stress the European cancer systems for years to come. If it is going to stress Europe's health systems, it is more than plausible that such delays will stress other healthcare systems throughout the world for years to come and further contribute to the non-COVID death count.
Second, this report from The Lancet only covered cancer. There is more than cancer that can kill people. There are various forms of cardiovascular disease, diabetes, stroke, and other respiratory diseases aside from COVID, to name but a few. And let's not forget that researchers at the University of Southern California and RAND Corporation found that lockdowns actually caused increased excess deaths.
All of this to say that we will not understand the full cost of the COVID lockdowns for years to come. This report from The Lancet is but the tip of the iceberg in terms of the considerable harm that the lockdowns caused to public health. That is why this is a "November 2022 edition" of figuring out how postponing non-COVID healthcare caused its own healthcare costs. I hope to cover this topic at a future date when we have more data. In the meantime, I will say that as we collect more data on the effects of lockdowns, it becomes more evident that lockdowns were never the appropriate response to dealing with COVID.
My dear friend Georgia passed away from Covid - I mean end-stage colorectal cancer as she was fearful of Covid and the doctor’s offices and day surgery centers closed down.
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