When the coronavirus pandemic took hold in 2020, business did not go on as usual. Many day-to-day services in the NHS were put on hold to react to the emergency situation that was developing. As well as that, people became more reluctant to go to the doctors.
Not only were people worried about coming into contact and getting sick with the virus, many worried about taking up medic's precious time. By 2021, we saw the impact that this had. The number of new cases of cancer in Wales increased by 10.
2% compared to that of 2020. There was a total of 19,625 cases of cancer diagnosed in that year alone, according to Public Health Wales. READ MORE: Wales' creaking NHS hits grim milestone as troubles grow READ MORE: Huge change for some Welsh NHS patients waiting for treatment Even in 2021, the number of cases being picked up was still lower than that of 2018-2019.
This means that in the year that most health care cancer screenings and routine appointments returned, cases still weren't being picked up as often as they had been prior to the pandemic. PHW explained that there are two cancers that have seen the "biggest recovery" when it comes to identifying new cases, these are bowel and female breast cancer. The number of cases picked up in 2021 exceeded pre-pandemic levels.
Bowel cancer diagnoses saw a 9.4 percent increase, while female breast cancer cases rose by 5.5 percent compared to the 2018-2019 average.
Screening programmes for bowel and breast cancer were brought back in in Au.