No plan to cancel surgeries in second COVID wave, health minister says

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Also last spring, cancer screenings were cancelled, which caused significant delays for some patients to find out whether they needed treatment. But a similar disruption to diagnostic cancer tests is not expected this winter, said Dr. Kim Nguyen Chi, the medical health officer at B.C. Cancer, in a recent interview.

“I think we are actually managing through the second wave,” he said.

Experts used the time over the summer and fall to prepare for this second wave, and the potential that the pandemic could still worsen.

“So even if a whole cancer centre went down, it would be a challenge, but we have plans to treat all those people. So we’ve done tabletop exercises to ensure that we are ready and able to respond to any outbreak if something like that happened. That’s the beauty of the time that we had to fully prepare,” Chi said.

“And with the vaccine here, there’s a light at the end of the tunnel. But it is a long tunnel. So my plea is for the general public to be taking this seriously,” said, encouraging everyone to wear a mask and keep socially distant.

Postmedia reported Sunday that cancer diagnoses are down in British Columbia right now, prompting Chi and others to encourage patients with delayed screening procedures or those with troubling symptoms to make a medical appointment soon. The fear is that hundreds of people could be at home with undiagnosed cancers, and that the cancers will be more extreme by the time they get tested.

Dix shares those concerns. “It’s why we encourage people when they need to go to an emergency room to go to an emergency room, or when they need to be screened, to be screened,” he said.

“What we’ve been doing proactively on surgeries … is reaching out (to those waiting for surgery). And, obviously, you cannot reach out to people who you don’t know have cancer because they don’t have a diagnosis.”

lculbert@postmedia.com