The numbers are vague, the victims are diffused throughout the population and will die from many causes, but it is becoming clear that the victims whose lives are utterly ruined or who die from pandemic mitigation efforts will outnumber the victims of COVID, and by a substantial number.

And if you calculate the costs and benefits by life-years, as they do when evaluating interventions, it won’t even be close. All life is precious, but if you had to choose between saving a toddler and a 99 year-old, you save the toddler. That is basic triage.

A new study in The Lancet takes a look at one of the many many costs associated with pandemic response: delayed health care and screening for  cancer, and the associated loss of research due to the dropping of cancer studies during the pandemic.

The news is awful. Not just bad, but awful. Europe is now facing a “cancer epidemic” that will plague the continent for a decade. The same will be true here in America.

Experts have warned that Europe faces a “cancer epidemic” unless urgent action is taken to boost treatment and research, after an estimated 1m diagnoses were missed during the pandemic.

The impact of Covid-19 and the focus on it has exposed “weaknesses” in cancer health systems and in the cancer research landscape across the continent, which, if not addressed as a matter of urgency, will set back cancer outcomes by almost a decade, leading healthcare and scientific experts say.

One million cancer diagnoses not made during the pandemic. A million people whose treatment should have started, but didn’t–in Europe alone. Here is the US the increased cancer burden from pandemic-related delays has yet to be tallied as far as I can find, but there is lots of evidence that you can piece together. One study done last counted up 38 types of delays in cancer treatment caused by pandemic mitigations. Those were patients who were known to have cancer but couldn’t get treatment because hospitals shut down or delayed services.

Back to Europe:

One unintended consequence of the pandemic was the adverse effects that the rapid repurposing of health services and national lockdowns, and their continuing legacy, have had on cancer services, on cancer research, and on patients with cancer, the experts said.

“To emphasise the scale of this problem, we estimate that about 1m cancer diagnoses might have been missed across Europe during the Covid-19 pandemic,” they wrote in The Lancet Oncology. “There is emerging evidence that a higher proportion of patients are diagnosed with later cancer stages compared with pre-pandemic rates as a result of substantial delays in cancer diagnosis and treatment. This cancer stage shift will continue to stress European cancer systems for years to come.

“These issues will ultimately compromise survival and contribute to inferior quality of life for many European patients with cancer.”

The report analysed data and found clinicians saw 1.5 million fewer patients with cancer in the first year of the pandemic, with one in two patients with cancer not receiving surgery or chemotherapy in a timely manner. About 100m screenings were missed, and it is estimated that as many as 1 million European citizens may have an undiagnosed cancer as a result of the backlog.

During the worst of COVID emergency rooms were slammed by COVID cases, and it was horrible. As COVID became less dangerous emergency rooms were slammed due to labor shortages. Today emergency rooms are slammed due to the burden of delayed care.

A couple weeks ago I had chest pain and went to the Emergency Room. As a double-bypass survivor, no doctor will talk to me about these issues before an emergency workup, so I dutifully waited my turn while worrying about a possible heart attack (it wasn’t, I’m fine). Sitting across the way was a woman having a stroke, whose face was visibly drooping. She was getting worse by the minute.

We each waited 6 hours to see a doctor. In a suburban hospital, not a Level 1 trauma center that sees gunshot victims, of whom there are now too many in Minneapolis. The wait was excruciating and ridiculous. In a normal world both of us would have been seen rapidly since heart attacks and strokes generally get to the front of the line, as they can be fatal.

When I finally saw the doctor I asked why the delay? Is labor still so tight in medicine? “Oh no,” she responded. “It is people who delayed care during the pandemic who are now severely ill.” She shrugged. What could she do?

This is the result of paying exclusive attention to the seen vs. the unseen. The victims of COVID were clear, obvious, and easy to count. You could point to them and see the horror before your eyes. Lots of people warned that the priorities were way off, but the policymakers wouldn’t listen. They didn’t want to take blame for the deaths people could see and assign to them, however unfairly.

The people who have and will die from neglect because we poured everything we had into COVID prevention–much of that effort was worthless or of very minor long-term value–are spread around, easy to ignore, and hard to directly relate to the wrongheaded COVID policies. It will take studies to discover them.

But they are victims nonetheless. We can’t often point to a precise person and declare absolutely that they died from pandemic policy with proof, but that is simply because the final link in the causal chain isn’t “pandemic policy,” it is “cancer” that became deadly due to pandemic policy. It will be some undiscovered or untreated disease.

The death certificate will not say “Gretchen Whitmer” or “Anthony Fauci,” but they will be the authors of that death. They will live proud of their policies and fêted by the media for their wisdom. The children whose learning and social development were interrupted by evil policies will never get their early years back; the cancer, heart disease, and all the other patients who have or will die due to delayed care will never be recognized as their victims. 

But nevertheless they are. COVID madness will turn out to be a much bigger killer than COVID itself. And chances are none of the perpetrators of these crimes will ever pay a significant price.

Andrew Cuomo killed thousands through his policies, but he went down due to harassing his own aides. He made millions writing about killing grandma and was applauded. It was his personal obnoxiousness that brought derision and for which he paid a price.

This is justice?