Many people with cancer are having to wait too long to be diagnosed due to Covid-19 restrictions, a top specialist warns.
Professor Frank Frizzelle, medical advisor for Bowel Cancer New Zealand, said after the nationwide lockdown last year, it took almost a year to clear thebacklog of investigations and treatments.
"When the health system works at 97 or 98 per cent of capacity all the time, when you take a chunk of time out, there's no capacity to catch up.
"And when you look at the figures put out by the national Cancer Control Agency, you can see the huge drop in the number of colonoscopies caused a real hiatus in diagnoses, and that led to delayed diagnoses.
"As we know that outcomes improve with earlier diagnosis, these delays are important and can lead to the need for more extensive (and expensive) treatment and worse outcomes."
While everyone accepted the need for public health measures to curb the spread of Delta, there needed to be a "more nuanced response" outside Auckland, he said.
"There are other places where there is no Delta and there's capacity, people are sitting around doing nothing. We have a window in those places to do stuff now and we need to be doing it.
