“It’s unheard of”, “we see people arriving in terrible states”: the drop in diagnoses during the pandemic is already being felt in the hospital where the number of patients is exploding.
Oncology specialists have never experienced such a situation. And for good reason, cancer patients are jostling at the doors of hospitals. Some had interrupted their treatment during successive confinements and others were simply afraid to return to hospital because of Covid-19.
Today, undetected cancers over the past two years look like a “real ticking time bomb”judges Dr. El Ali, head of the medical oncology department at Iris Sud hospitals, who claims to have never seen this before. “I have worked for more than 15 years in this service and I am shocked by what I see. The patients arrive in very advanced states, with livers full of metastases where there is almost no liver left, as many patients in such states, I had never known it. Very often, it is difficult to treat them and we go directly to comfort care. We see that people come back little by little to be treated, to receive their treatment or to be screen, patients who were afraid to come to the hospital because of the Covid.
The biggest post-pandemic challenge