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Patients with suspected cancer deemed urgent by GPs should be given a two-week wait for a hospital referral to prevent it spreading or becoming untreatable. But many hospital diagnostic services have not properly opened up face-to-face consultations or examinations for these cases, due to fears over spreading coronavirus. It is feared there will be a rise in cancer deaths, as well as those from other conditions, unless coronavirus-related delays on hospital capacity are resolved.

The news will add pressure on the Government to address the growing non-Covid-19 and timecritical patient waiting list at a time when even urgent cancer referrals have seen a dramatic fall and are running at only half of that expected.

Charities Cancer Research UK and Macmillan are examining cases in which hospitals have turned down GP diagnostic referrals. It follows reports that procedures such as ultrasounds and chest X-rays for urgent suspected cancer cases were downgraded or deferred.

Dr Richard Vautrey, chair of the British Medical Association’s general practitioners’ committee, said: “We have seen referrals including some twoweek wait referrals being downgraded across many parts of the country.

“Hospitals have been through a difficult time but many diagnostics for colorectal, uterine and bladder cancers are still not available.

“It is a trading of health problems. The NHS needs to ensure all patients who need treatment get treatment.”

Sara Hiom, director of early diagnosis and cancer intelligence at Cancer Research UK, said: “We are very concerned cancer cases are being missed and we are examining reports of inappropriate downgrading of GP cancer referrals to hospitals.

“Despite national guidelines stating that urgent and essential cancer treatments must continue, unfortunately this is not always the case.

“Cancer doesn’t stop just because we are in a coronavirus pandemic.”

Professor Pat Price, cancer expert and founder and chair of the charity Action Radiotherapy, said: “This will have a domino effect and we are bracing ourselves for a tsunami of cancer cases.

“Delays in restarting diagnostic services will lead to delays in diagnosis and more advanced cancer. More patients will no longer be curable by surgery, meaning we will have to deal with our own backlog, as well as these cases which were not treated in a timely way. This will likely be overwhelming.”

Professor Angus Dalgleish, a cancer specialist at St George’s Hospital in Tooting, south London, said: “This is trading deaths. There is no common sense to this.

“Patients, including cancer patients, across the country are already dying.

“If we don’t get services back to normal more people will die because of lockdown, crashing the economy and the disruption to NHS services than those saved by it.”

Gordon Wishart, a leading breast cancer surgeon and chief medical officer of private screening company Check4Cancer, said the delays were storing up more problems for the future.

He said: “Delays in cancer diagnosis lead to patients ultimately requiring more treatment and having a worse prognosis and in some cases lost chances of survival.”

Earlier this month, Pulse magazine reported that GPs in London had expressed concern that “hundreds” of cancer referrals were being rejected or deferred.

Richard Sullivan, professor of cancer and global health at King’s College London, said the number of cancer deaths caused by disruption to NHS services would likely outweigh the number of deaths caused by coronavirus.

An NHS spokesperson said: “Vital tests and treatments are going ahead as quickly and safely as possible, with almost 30,000 people beginning treatment in March – the highest monthly number on record.”

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Another invisible enemy is worse than Covid-19 fear will kill many more – comment by Professor Karol Sikora

There is an invisible enemy now running riot through our way of life. It’s shattered the economy, torn families apart and will result in a tragic death toll. Coronavirus isn’t the only threat we’re facing; I believe fear is going to cause far more deaths than the disease.

The deliberate terror that has been imprinted on the nation’s psyche has been profound and has far-reaching consequences. History has shown it’s very easy to petrify a population into following orders by powerful brainwashing. But once it’s implemented, its reversal becomes a huge challenge.

Whenever I switch on the media, I’m bombarded by intense adverts warning me of the dangers of leaving my house or drifting too close to fellow shoppers. The actors’ voices are spooky. But it’s got out of hand – people understand the risks and the “stay alert” cliche is meaningless. We need to use the same powerful psych-ops team that got us into this mess to lower the fear level urgently and get us back to normal.

The official death toll from the Government stands at nearly 40,000. Some have estimated it to be higher. Recorded positive tests now number 265,277, although every expert agrees the real number is far, far higher with at least five million infected.

The conclusion from these numbers is that while our mortality count is tragic and any death is regrettable, most of those who catch it will recover with no lasting problems. Incredibly, half of us will have no symptoms at all.

We all fall into one of three categories – the susceptible, the infected and the recovered. For unknown reasons, our government will not release official recovery statistics. I’ve pushed and pushed the Government to publish these figures daily and it has committed to doing so. But this was more than a week ago now. I hope we will see them soon.

Seeing the vast number of people who have recovered will provide an antidote to the new infections and fatalities. Some corners of the media have not helped calm this culture of fear.

Using the cumulative death toll gives us little information on how the pandemic is progressing – there is no question that the peak in Britain was just before Easter. Since then the numbers of daily deaths have consistently declined. Would you know that from watching television? I doubt it.

I’ve been treating cancer patients for all my adult life. I’ve become far too familiar with the concept of uncertainty, fear and death. I have learnt mechanisms to process it. For many, watching these sad statistics keep rising is just too much.

Neighbours of mine are too afraid to leave their homes. They think I’m a lunatic for getting the train to London regularly. How on earth does the Government think it can get the economy and society moving again while millions of people are living in terror? Every time we get out of bed in the morning, we face risk.

Unfortunately, there are lots of things in this world that could do us harm. If we took them all as seriously as the virus the country would grind to a halt.

The reason I got involved in this debate was to stand up for the cancer patients I knew would get forgotten. There are those who know they have cancer and have had their treatments rationed.

More worryingly, the tens of thousands of missing patients in April and May. In two months, there should have been 60,000 new cancer patients. Where are they? The cancer diagnostic pathway has been shattered by the virus. We need to get the NHS back to business now. Cancer doesn’t stop for pandemics.

I fear that as we enter the last dance with the virus and it fades away into the summer sun, the startling damage it has caused will begin to emerge. It isn’t just cancer, there are a whole plethora of health conditions going untreated because people are just too frightened to get medical help.

It’s not just physical health that has been impacted. The nation’s mental wellbeing has taken a battering. The Samaritans are reporting a huge surge in demand for help.

The Government’s propaganda machine has been brutally effective. People are paralysed psychologically, scared of their own shadows.

We can’t let the last dance linger on any longer.

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