Pandemic priorities.

Today is six months since the WHO were informed about the novel coronavirus outbreak that would become known as COVID-19. The pandemic is not over. It is still raging in Brazil and the US, among many other places, and has re-surged in countries that had managed to contain it and begun to re-open, leading to new lockdowns in parts of China, Germany and the UK. Ireland is moving rapidly along its 'roadmap' of re-opening, and entered Phase 3 yesterday. Media attention has centred on the pubs, hairdressers and barbers that re-opened yesterday. Miles of column inches have been devoted to the pubs which are only allowed to re-open in this phase if they serve a substantial meal, costing €9, to every customer. Otherwise the bars have to wait three whole weeks to re-open normally, without the food requirement. Meanwhile cancer screening has yet to re-start. Cervical cancer screening will hopefully restart next month, and breast cancer and bowel cancer screening will not begin until September, another three months wait. It's clear what the priorities of the Irish government and the country are.

It's estimated that just from the breast cancer screening that wasn't done in April 2020, 548 abnormalities have been missed, with 103 of them likely to require treatment. What has been missed in May and June we don't yet have estimated figures for. Let alone the numbers missed in cervical and bowel cancer screening. Instead of over 21,000 cervical smear tests done in April 2019, there were just under 1,000 smear tests processed by CervicalCheck in April 2020, all of which were from colposcopy clinics. Meanwhile symptomatic referrals from GPs for breast, prostate, lung and skin cancers are down 25% compared to March-May last year. These are the more worrying indicators, because rather than the screening programmes for healthy people, these are people with symptoms who have seen their GP and been referred by their doctors for further assessment. There doesn't seem to be any suggestion that screening or cancer services will be massively ramped up now and in the next few months, to incorporate the new distancing and hygiene requirements, compensate for what hasn't been done, and attempt to catch the hundreds or thousands of people with cancer symptoms who could benefit, some of whom would have their lives saved, by early cancer detection and treatment. What will be the ultimate results of our response to this pandemic, in terms of other health problems, other causes of death? I fear in the next year we will see the next wave of deaths, but they won't be due to coronavirus. They will be because of what we chose to focus on, and what we are prioritising now. As usual Waterford Whispers News have captured the brutal reality perfectly: Breast Cancer Checks To Restart If Carried Out Alongside Lasagne And Chips.

The terrible toll of this pandemic on the elderly in care homes is horrendous and the scale of their deaths and suffering is still not being fully acknowledged. People are still dying even as we have not been able to properly grieve the lost loved ones who have died since March. The impact on migrant workers in meat-packing plants, and migrants in Direct Provision centres, needs to be more fully recognised too. The regressive impact of the pandemic on women is enormous but again not fully acknowledged, let alone compensated for. It is women who make up the majority of health and care workers, women who are more likely to have lost their jobs in the retail and service sectors, women who have seen their already disproportionate burden of housework, care work and childcare massively increase over the past three months. I suspect that the poor and more socio-economically disadvantaged groups and areas of the country have suffered disproportionately too. The pandemic has made these long-standing inequalities and injustices in Irish society more starkly clear than ever before. We have a chance to recognise these inequities and more importantly we have the opportunity now to act to do things differently in future. There should be no going back to 'normal'. Normal didn't work for the majority of people. We have suffered, and we have been warned. We could make a better world now. I hope we will.