Counting the Cost of Britain’s Lockdown

The trade-offs get harder in a socialized medical system

WSJ editorial.

"Public-health experts will spend years quantifying the full effects of coronavirus lockdowns, but early efforts already point to significant health costs around the world. The latest is a study warning that Britain may pay a high price in cancer deaths for the United Kingdom’s war against the pandemic.

The suspension of cancer screening during the pandemic and delays in further testing and treatment have probably erased years of improvements in survival rates, the London-based Institute for Public Policy Research wrote this week. Britons missed more than 200,000 cancer screenings each week of the lockdown, and backlogs remain.

The five-year survival rate for lung cancer may drop to 15.4% from 16.2% in 2017 (the most recent data). For breast cancer the rate could decline to 83.5% from 85%, and for colorectal cancer to 56.1% from 58.4%. You have to go back to 2016 (lung), 2011 (breast) and 2009 (colorectal) to encounter survival rates that low.

Britain will not be alone in discovering such unintended health consequences. But it’s a notable case because the U.K. was lagging the rest of the developed world in cancer outcomes before the pandemic. Late diagnosis is a chronic failure in the socialized National Health Service. The pandemic made a bad situation worse by forcing officials to ration care from potential cancer patients more aggressively.

The IPPR is a progressive think tank and its report argues for more money for the NHS to treat cancer and a pandemic at the same time. Politicians will pick up that refrain. But it’s more accurate to note that state-run medicine created a system that already failed large numbers of cancer patients, and then had no choice but to fail even more when confronted with an unusual event.

American voters, take note. The virus undoubtedly has had a negative effect on treatment for cancer and other serious diseases in the U.S., but starting from a position of consistently better patient outcomes. Would Bernie Sanders’s Medicare for All or Joe Biden’s Medicare for More be as resilient?"