Impact of COVID-19 Pandemic on Cancer Screening in the United States

Abstract

COVID-19 pandemic has exposed vulnerabilities all across the global healthcare systems including those within the United States. A systematic evaluation of these soft spots has been crucial in order to reengineer the healthcare system for enhanced competences and superior quality of care. One area that has been undoubtedly affected is the diagnosis and management of neoplastic diseases. The healthcare system in the US witnessed an instantaneous implementation of a “social distancing” strategy, which was implemented in an effort to flatten the infectivity “curve”. This required an urgent modification in the general administration of healthcare delivery, independent of COVID-19 infection status of a patient. For the non-COVID patients, it meant a shift from in-person to a virtual administration platform.''(Royce et al., 2020) Neither the healthcare providers, nor the patients, or the hospital management were adequately prepared for this sudden transition. Various healthcare services offered through these healthcare systems were required to be triaged based upon patients' assessment of needs into either emergent, urgent or routine/non- urgent. Patients seeking services that fell in the non- urgent/routine clinical visits were encouraged to stay home until the pandemic simmered down/resolved. This strategy was erroneously predicated on a rather short anticipated duration of the pandemic. As expected, cancer screening visits were deemed non- urgent and thus most healthcare facilities in and outside the US suspended these services, inadvertently compromising the timely diagnosis of neoplastic disorders.