Professor Gordon Wishart

Last week, amid a flurry of election policies and debates, a striking report found that cancer survival in England currently lags up to 25 years behind European countries like Sweden, Norway and Denmark. From bowel cancer to breast diagnoses, England is firmly lagging behind our Scandinavian neighbours. What’s to blame? Why aren’t major parties discussing how this decline could be reversed in their manifestos? The revelation by Macmillan Cancer Support is the legacy of many years of underfunding, resulting in delays to diagnosis and treatment. England has less scanners, beds, cancer specialists & nurses per head of population than comparable countries.

Everyone understood the government message in March 2020 to stay at home, protect the NHS and save lives. Yet the lives that we knew were being saved were ones from Covid-19. Anything more long-term than daily figures never registered. The concept of other causes of death – most devastatingly cancer – were secondary concerns. We may be about to see the consequences of this Covid solipsism. The recent cross-party parliamentary report “Catch Up With Cancer – The Way Forward” showed that UK lockdowns had resulted in a staggering drop in cancer treatment. There were 350,000 fewer urgent cancer referrals in 2020, and 40,000 fewer cancer diagnoses, compared to 2019.

It is hard to remember a time when the daily drip of Covid statistics was not part of our lives. Since March 2020, we have been greeted every afternoon with a stream of government released data filling us in on the number of infections, hospitalisations and deaths. But how necessary is it today? With a current seven-day average of only seven Covid deaths a day, the lowest level since 15 March 2020, what do we stand to gain by continuing with this current approach? It is becoming increasingly apparent that the Indian variant is not going to swamp hospitals – and that concerns about fully unlocking on 21 June are over-egged. Even if this particular variant does prove to be more transmissible, the effectiveness of the vaccines prevents it from being of much concern.

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.