Life years and lockdown: estimating the effects on Covid-19 and cancer outcomes from the UK’s response to the pandemic

The life-years saved from Covid-19 deaths that have been averted as a result of lockdown measures may be fewer than the life-years that will be lost from deaths resulting from curable diseases, according to a research paper published in the European Journal of Clinical Oncology and authored by Pinar Jenkins, Karol Sikora and Paul Dolan. “Lockdown policies have had a direct impact on people’s willingness – and ability – to access health and social services, which is likely to lead to a direct increase in morbidity and mortality rates from curable diseases such as cancer and strokes,” say the paper’s authors,

The paper states that around three million people in the UK missed cancer diagnostics due to the lockdown. “As little as a four-week delay was associated with an increased mortality in seven cancer types,” it states. “Recent research suggests that a delay in patient presentation and diagnosis for cancer would lead to 25,812 life-years lost if the delay is one month long and 173,540 life-years lost if the delay is six months long." You can view the paper here.