Cancer patients may only be guaranteed timely treatment if Covid-19 stays ‘under control’, Matt Hancock claimed today as he faced a roasting from MPs over an Excel spreadsheet blunder that has potentially led to tens of thousands of Britons being unaware they are infected with the virus.
The Health Secretary claimed that it was ‘critical for everybody to understand the best way to keep cancer services running is to suppress the disease’, suggesting that hundreds of thousands of patients may face delays to planned surgery and chemotherapy, if the outbreak continues to spiral.
Vital operations were cancelled and patients missed out on potentially life-saving therapy in the spring because tackling Covid-19 became the sole focus of the health service, instead of cancer and other cruel diseases.
Almost 2.5million people missed out on cancer screening, referrals or treatment at the height of lockdown, even though the NHS was never overwhelmed — despite fears it would be crippled by the pandemic.
Experts now fear the number of people dying as a result of delays triggered by the treatment of coronavirus patients could even end up being responsible for as many deaths as the pandemic itself.
Surgeons have worriedly called for hospital beds to be ‘ring-fenced’ for planned operations during the pandemic, to avoid the upheaval of spring where patients faced a ‘tsunami of cancellations’ as the health service focused on battling coronavirus.
But in a bruising appearance in the House of Commons today, Mr Hancock warned Covid-19 could once again disrupt cancer treatment and told MPs that controlling the virus would allow the NHS to ‘recover the treatment that we need to for cancer and other killer diseases’.
He said: ‘It’s critical for everybody to understand that the best way to keep cancer services running is to suppress the disease, and the more the disease is under control the more we can both recover and continue with cancer treatments.
Labour also viciously tore into Mr Hancock’s latest blunder, which saw officials miss 16,000 positive test results because of a cataclysmic Excel error. Around 50,000 of their contacts are estimated to have gone un-traced.
Firing on all cylinders after the his counterpart failed to answer exactly many of them have now been traced, Shadow Health Secretary Jonathan Ashworth said: ‘So, essentially there are thousands of people who have been exposed to the virus who are probably wandering around not knowing they’ve been exposed and could be infecting people, and he cannot even tell us if they’ve been traced.’
No 10 admitted this afternoon that just 63 per cent of the ‘missing’ 16,000 Covid-19 cases have been contacted by NHS Test and Trace. Most contacts are tracked and told to self-isolate within 48 hours, but ongoing delays with the system mean many continue to circulate through the community after being exposed to the virus. Experts have warned the system will only be effective if the vast majority of cases are tracked quickly.
Britain recorded 76 coronavirus deaths today, with ten in Wales, as the number of new cases identified spiked to 14,542 across the country. It is thought this is far from the height of the pandemic when an estimated 100,000 new infections occurred every day.