Dödligt virus från Kina orsakar panik (SARS-CoV-2, COVID-19)

A drop-off in screening and referrals means roughly 2,700 fewer people are being diagnosed every week, Cancer Research UK says.

Cancer screening has paused in Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland, with few invitations sent out in England.

People are still advised to contact their GP with worrying symptoms.

But Richard Sullivan, professor of cancer and global health at King's College London, said there was more fear of Covid-19 than of having cancer at the moment. With GPs more difficult to contact than normal, this was resulting in a "dramatic drop-off" in referrals to specialists, he said.

"Most modellers in the UK estimate excess of deaths is going to be way greater than we are going to see with Covid-19," he said.

With cancer patients generally much younger, Prof Sullivan predicted "years of lost life will be quite dramatic" on top of "a huge amount of avoidable mortality".

Sarah Woolnough, executive director for policy at Cancer Research UK, said it was of "huge concern" that there had been a 75% drop in urgent referrals by GPs of people with suspected cancer.

According to the cancer charity:

2,300 people a week are not being diagnosed through urgent referrals
400 people a week are not being diagnosed through screening

Results
The CovidSim model would have produced a good forecast of the subsequent data if initialised with
a reproduction number of about 3.5 for covid-19. The model predicted that school closures and
isolation of younger people would increase the total number of deaths, albeit postponed to a second and subsequent waves. The findings of this study suggest that prompt interventions were shown to be highly effective at reducing peak demand for intensive care unit (ICU) beds but also prolong the epidemic, in some cases resulting in more deaths long term. This happens because covid-19 related mortality is highly skewed towards older age groups. In the absence of an effective vaccination programme, none of the proposed mitigation strategies in the UK would reduce
the predicted total number of deaths below 200000

Conclusions
It was predicted in March 2020 that in response to covid-19 a broad lockdown, as opposed to a focus on shielding the most vulnerable members of society, would reduce immediate demand for ICU beds at the cost of more deaths long term. The optimal strategy for saving lives in a covid-19 epidemic is different from that anticipated for an influenza epidemic with a different mortality age profile.

What this study adds
The model used for Report 9 was independently validated and verified, and predicts that, in the absence of an effective vaccine for covid-19, school closures would result in more overall deaths than no school closures. Mitigating a covid-19 epidemic requires a different strategy from an influenza
epidemic, with more focus on shielding elderly and vulnerable people

Similarly, adding general social distancing to a scenario involving household isolation
of suspected cases (case isolation) and household quarantine of family members, with appropriate
estimates for compliance, was also projected to increase the total number of deaths...Moreover, it shows that social distancing in those over 70 would be more effective than general social distancing.

Nevertheless, in all mitigation scenarios, epidemics modelled using CovidSim eventually finish with widespread infection and immunity, and the final death toll depends primarily on the age distribution of those infected and not the total number.