28 Jul: Daily Mail: A THIRD of cancer patients have met potentially life-threatening disruptions to their treatment due to the coronavirus pandemic, study reveals
•Hundreds of thousands of patients have had bookings delayed or cancelled
•Cancer Research predicts 38,000 fewer treatments took place during lockdown
•There are fears the NHS faces a growing backlog that will ‘only get worse’
by Eleanor Hayward, health reporter
Hundreds of thousands have had vital scans, tests, surgery, chemotherapy or radiotherapy delayed or cancelled during lockdown, a study by Cancer Research found...
Some of these procedures would have saved or extended lives, granting cancer patients precious extra time with friends and family...
Cancer Research found that 70 per cent of people who had experienced delays or cancellations feel more frustrated and anxious.
One 73-year-old woman with stage four lung and breast cancer said she had had two appointments with oncologists postponed.
She added: ‘I am still waiting to speak to someone to know if I can have treatment. ‘I am very scared. I don’t want to die during this Covid outbreak without seeing my loved ones.’
One man with stage three genitourinary cancer said: ‘Because my treatment has been postponed when I need it most, my cancer has already spread to the lymph nodes and I worry the longer I am left untreated, with zero emotional mental health support, the worse I become or that the cancer spreads further.’...
NHS data shows some 106,535 urgent cancer referrals were made by GPs in England in May – nearly half the 200,599 performed in May 2019.
And 55,500 more people are now waiting to have key cancer tests in England’s hospitals compared to the same period last year.
Meanwhile more than two million people have been left waiting for breast, bowel and cervical screening...
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8566237/A-cancer-patients-potentially-life-threatening-disruptions-coronavirus-pandemic.html
25 Jul: Spectator Australia: One of the most colossal failures of the century
History will be scathing about government responses to Covid-19
by James Allan, Garrick Professor of Law at the University of Queensland
I have been a sceptic of the Australian, and most other, government’s reactions to this virus virtually from day one. In fact I started expressing my scepticism for the Speccie Australia way back at the start of April. Nothing I have read about the virus since has changed my mind that the Swedish government got this right (as did Taiwan’s) and virtually the whole of the rest of the democratic world’s political class screwed up big time. What I said back then I’ll repeat now: in a decade this will be looked back on as one of the most colossal public policy fiascos of the century...
Want to bet whether the response would have been less draconian had every politician and bureaucrat had to take a 20 per cent pay cut if businesses were shut down? Want to bet whether the incessant fear-porn of the ABC (Australia) would have stopped if the ABC were looking at a 20 per cent annual cut if a lockdown had to be instituted? (And by ABC ‘fear-porn’ I mean such things as their always choosing the most alarming way to report facts – so ‘deaths’ not ‘deaths per million’; percentage increase or absolute numbers, whichever is worse; saying new cases going up but ignoring death rate is going down; no reporting of normal yearly flu deaths, or car deaths, or that corona hasn’t cracked the top 50 causes of death, or that for those under 45 corona is less lethal (and I mean everywhere in the world) than getting in a car and going for a Sunday drive; never noting anything about Sweden in a non-alarmist light, and so on.)
No skin in the game readers. So they can afford to pretend that the deaths from corona do count in any calculation but the deaths caused by the lockdown (suicides, more cancer from less screening, all the devastation in the Third World from the ruined global economy, deaths from a ruined economy here, etc.) do not count.
In my view, politicians should be looking at massive pay cuts, now. Ditto civil servants. Ditto the ABC. And the pay cuts should stay until we return to normal unemployment rates and are paying off the debt. But don’t hold your breath, mask or no mask.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2020/07/one-of-the-most-colossal-failures-of-the-century/
24 Jul: Daily Mail: Cancer patients will die because Government ‘scaremongering’ over Covid-19 stopped people visiting hospitals during the crisis, NHS nurse says
•Nurse said that ‘hospitals were empty’ apart from Covid-19 patients and ICUs
•There was ‘no reason’ cancer screenings should have been stopped in lockdown
•She said most NHS Trusts had enough PPE to have continued to operate ‘beyond the skeleton Covid system’ by mid-April
By Isabella Nikolic
The nurse, who wanted to remain anonymous, said that ‘hospitals were empty’ apart from Covid-19 wards and ICUs and that people died because of they weren’t treated.
She added that there was ‘no reason’ that cancer screenings and other routine treatments could not have continued throughout lockdown...
Her comments come after a Government report revealed that 200,000 people could die because of delays in healthcare and other economic and social effects all caused by lockdown...
Speaking on the Telegraph’s Planet Normal podcast, the nurse said: ‘We have a lot of deaths in my area but we’re going to have an awful lot more from cancers that are going undiagnosed and strokes that haven’t been treated.
‘It cuts both ways. We have hospitals that didn’t want to have patients come in and we have patients who don’t want to come in to hospital because of I think what’s been an awful lot of scaremongering from the Government, unfortunately.’(AND THE FAKENEWSMSM)...
She said that as soon as it became clear that the NHS wasn’t going to be overwhelmed by coronavirus patients, other services should have restarted.
And the nurse went on to criticise GPs who had chosen to only do telephone and video consultations.
She said that people who will die because of measures that were initially put in place to protect the NHS will include ‘young healthy people who had treatable cancers and treatable issues’...
The University of Oxford discovered just last week that 5,000 fewer heart attack patients had attended hospital between March and May.
The report – published in April but largely overlooked until now – has added credence to the view that patients with serious illnesses unrelated to coronavirus have been neglected during the pandemic...
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8552175/Cancer-patients-die-Government-scaremongering-Covid-19-stopped-hospital-visits.html