Once they did come in, they were sicker-a trend observed for all sorts of ailments, including childhood diabetes, appendicitis, and cancer. As a result, in every week through July 2020, roughly 45 percent of American adults said that over the preceding month, they either put off medical care or didn’t get it at all because of the pandemic. Many of the country’s hospitals were overwhelmed with COVID patients, and outpatient clinics had closed. At some point, the emergency phase of COVID will end, but the physical toll of the pandemic may linger in the bodies of Americans for decades to come.ĭuring those bleak pre-vaccine dark ages, going to the doctor could feel like a disaster in waiting. The scope of this damage isn’t yet clear-and likely won’t come into focus for several years-but there are troubling signs of a looming chronic health crisis the country has yet to reckon with. Mental-health issues are more severe, and her patients struggling with addiction have been more likely to relapse.Įven as Americans are treating the pandemic like an afterthought, a disturbing possibility remains: COVID aside, is the country simply going to be in worse health than before the pandemic? According to health-care workers, administrations, and researchers I talked with from across the country, patients are still dealing with a suite of problems from delaying care during the pandemic, problems that in some cases they will be facing for the rest of their lives. Compared with before the pandemic, she is seeing more people further along with AIDS, more people with irreversible heart failure, and more people with end-stage kidney failure. “It just seems like my patients are sicker,” Laura said. But the delays in health care over the past two and a half years have allowed ailments to unduly worsen, wearing down people with non-COVID medical problems too. One estimate shows that life expectancy in the U.S. And they were still doing so well into 2021, at which point much of the country seemed to be moving on from COVID.īy this point, the coronavirus has killed more than 1 million Americans and debilitated many more. Patients were putting off health care through the end of the first pandemic year, when vaccines weren’t yet widely available. But the health-care delays didn’t just end when America began to reopen in the summer of 2020. With proper care, Laura said, “he could have stayed alive indefinitely.” ( The Atlantic agreed to withhold Laura’s last name, because she isn’t authorized to speak publicly about her patients.)Įarly in the pandemic, when much of the country was in lockdown, forgoing nonemergency health care as Laura’s patient did seemed like the right thing to do. “The next time I saw him, in early 2022, he required hospice care,” Laura told me. Then the pandemic hit, and he decided that going to the hospital wasn’t worth the risk of getting COVID. A middle-aged man diagnosed with Stage 3 colon cancer in 2019, he underwent surgery and a round of successful chemotherapy and was due for regular checkups to make sure the tumor wasn’t growing. The most haunting memory of the pandemic for Laura, a doctor who practices internal medicine in New York, is a patient who never got COVID at all.
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