With 161,000 deaths attributed to the coronavirus, the United Kingdom has one of the heaviest European tolls of the pandemic. He is now threatened by another health emergency: cancer. Craig Russell lost his daughter, Kelly, to bowel cancer in June 2020, aged just 31. “She had been diagnosed in 2017, at stage 4 of the disease, she was incurable. She went through several operations, chemotherapy, radiotherapy and clinical trials, everything was tried to prolong her life, says this father, calm and affable, living in Cheshire (northern England). Then the coronavirus arrived: in March 2020, she had an appointment at the hospital for a new cycle of chemo. But the oncologist told her that the treatment had to be suspended and that she had to isolate herself. We were in shock: the chemo was literally keeping her alive and it was thought that the risk of dying from cancer was so much greater than dying from the virus. She died twelve weeks later. »
Kelly remained engaged and positive until the end. “She encouraged other patients, advised people to go see their doctor as soon as suspicious symptoms appeared”, adds his admiring father. In memory of his daughter, in 2020, he founded a charity, Catch Up With Cancer, to alert politicians to the dramatic impact of the pandemic on the fight against cancer. 1er March, he again traveled to Westminster to remobilize the deputies and the Johnson government. In February, the Minister of Health, Sajid Javid, decreed a “War on Cancer” but without a real budget. “After eighteen months of mobilization, the rhetoric has improved, but it is far from enough”, deplores Mr. Russell, who wants “putting things into perspective: 160,000 people who died of coronavirus in our country, and, over the same period, 350,000 died of cancer”.
The figures are alarming: 6 million Britons are now on a waiting list for the NHS, the country’s free public healthcare system, for treatment or an operation – an absolute record. According to the National Audit Office (NAO, an independent public spending watchdog), between 240,000 and 740,000 urgent referrals from GPs to the NHS for suspected cancer cases were missed in the first 18 months of the pandemic, compared to the number of reports recorded over the same period of time before the start of the pandemic. In September 2021, between 35,000 and 60,000 fewer people than before the pandemic had started cancer treatment, the NAO also suggests.
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