COVID-19’s Lasting Impact
2021 Health Trends
Fighting an intense and immediate enemy like a novel coronavirus necessarily interrupts healthcare. Resources are diverted, experts are redeployed, people shelter at home. We battle the disease and put normal healthcare on hold. Experts and advocates are looking ahead to what that means in the next months and years. Chronic conditions treatment didn’t advance. Cancers and heart disease went underdiagnosed. People lived with high levels of stress and anxiety, often putting healthy routines on pause, too. Loss of work added new financial and personal pressures. As we enter a new year of promise for a vaccine, we look at all the things a vaccine just can’t solve for.
Critical Question
How can we help doctors and patients reconnect and fast-track needed tests and advances in care?
What RWE and RWD should we be looking at for clues into what’s next?
Did you know...
46%: Early in the pandemic, the mean number of weekly new diagnoses for six common cancers dropped by 46%. A study of data at twenty key institutions, found that compared to the same time period last year, breast cancer screenings are down 89%; colorectal, 85%.
— JAMA Network, Quest Diagnostics, 2020;
JCO Clinical Cancer Informatics, 2020
55%: Stress and boredom are driving an increase in alcohol and drug use during the pandemic. In one recent study, 55% of respondents reported higher rates of alcohol consumption; 18%, a significant increase. In the states hardest hit (NY, NJ, MA, RI, CT), 67% reported an increase; 25%, a significant one.
— Baptist Health, 2020
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