In my opinion (physician/radiologist) we're going to see higher mortality and health care costs for a while as we are just starting to feel the effects of covid/prolonged lockdowns on missed screening.
As one example, at my large tertiary care centre we were doing around 80% less screening mammograms during the pandemic and we are seeing ~2-3x more females presenting with locally advanced breast cancer than we were pre-covid (I believe the breast division is publishing a study on this in Ontario).
Locally advanced at presentation means you now also need systemic therapy (chemo) with its complications and possibly an axillary lymph node dissection (fair bit of morbidity with this) instead of what would have been a lumpectomy+radiation+sentinal node biopsy.
Beyond the direct patient morbidity and mortality effects (higher rates of metastatic disease and death go hand in hand with advanced presentations of all cancer) the strain on the system will mean we're busy/spending on dealing with these very sick patients that will undoubtedly impact other care we can provide (only so many $ and human resources to go around) and there will be some cascading effect (how much, I'm not sure).
It will take 3-5 years to fully capture what the human and financial cost of all of this would have been, versus what was saved with prolonged lockdowns (particularly post delta when Covid stopped becoming very deadly).
As one example, at my large tertiary care centre we were doing around 80% less screening mammograms during the pandemic and we are seeing ~2-3x more females presenting with locally advanced breast cancer than we were pre-covid (I believe the breast division is publishing a study on this in Ontario).
Locally advanced at presentation means you now also need systemic therapy (chemo) with its complications and possibly an axillary lymph node dissection (fair bit of morbidity with this) instead of what would have been a lumpectomy+radiation+sentinal node biopsy.
Beyond the direct patient morbidity and mortality effects (higher rates of metastatic disease and death go hand in hand with advanced presentations of all cancer) the strain on the system will mean we're busy/spending on dealing with these very sick patients that will undoubtedly impact other care we can provide (only so many $ and human resources to go around) and there will be some cascading effect (how much, I'm not sure).
It will take 3-5 years to fully capture what the human and financial cost of all of this would have been, versus what was saved with prolonged lockdowns (particularly post delta when Covid stopped becoming very deadly).