Too Many Americans Skip Life-Saving Cancer Screenings Due To COVID-19; Make Sure You Aren’t One of Them

Related: Cancer Screenings Have Dropped Nearly 70% Amid The Coronavirus Pandemic Delays In Routine Checkups Disrupt Early Detection

“Very early on, we saw a big decline in patients coming in,” says Dr. Heidi Gray, a gynecologic oncologist at the Seattle Cancer Care Alliance. “[They were] canceling surgeries, canceling appointments. We had patients that were on chemotherapy worried [and] they wanted to delay their chemotherapy because there was those few weeks where we weren’t sure how the pandemic was going. We saw a huge dip, particularly around surgeries.”

Dr. Heidi Gray explains how hospitals are handling cancer treatment amid COVID-19

Missing Cancer Screenings: Why It’s A Problem

It’s understandable that people want to limit their time outside of their home in order to avoid being exposed to the coronavirus, but experts say that doctors fear this means more cancers will go undiagnosed until patients feel comfortable visiting the hospital again  leading to an influx of cancer diagnoses at one time.

Related: Too Many Cancer Patients Ignoring Serious Life-Threatening Symptoms, Says NYU Oncologist 'Just Call Us'

"When we start opening the gates up and screening people again, those people will come in, [and] we're actually going to screen a lot more people in that first couple of months than we normally do," says Dr. Otis Brawley, a medical oncologist and epidemiologist at John Hopkins University. "Because we're screening more people then, we're going to diagnose more cancer. The clearing out of the prevalences is simply the people who would have been diagnosed during the period of no screening [that] are diagnosed when we start screening again.”

From The Experts: Get Screened

Due to the pandemic, hospitals and doctors have adjusted to changing guidelines and taking extra safety precautions to make sure patients aren’t at risk of contracting COVID-19, such as requiring patients to wear masks, testing everyone who enters the hospital, and sanitizing surfaces and equipment.

“It’s actually a very safe time for many hospitals because we have policies in place to screen patients and visitors prior to them coming in,” Dr. Gray explains. “So it’s really important, now that we’ve been living with COVID and we’ve adjusted our lives to COVID masking, social distancing, all of those things  that now we can’t forget about the rest of our medical care. We really do need to make sure patients if they’re having symptoms, if they’re having a medical concern, that they should be coming in.”

Dr. Heidi Gray says it’s critical patients still get medical care amid COVID-19

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