Predicted long‐term impact of <scp>COVID</scp> ‐19 pandemic‐related care delays on cancer mortality in Canada
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The COVID-19 pandemic has affected cancer care worldwide. This study aimed to estimate the long-term impacts of cancer care disruptions on cancer mortality in Canada using a microsimulation model. The model simulates cancer incidence and survival using cancer incidence, stage at diagnosis and survival data from the Canadian Cancer Registry. We modeled reported declines in cancer diagnoses and treatments recorded in provincial administrative datasets in March 2020 to June 2021. Based on the literature, we assumed that diagnostic and treatment delays lead to a 6% higher rate of cancer death per 4-week delay. After June 2021, we assessed scenarios where cancer treatment capacity returned to prepandemic levels, or to 10% higher or lower than prepandemic levels. Results are the median predictions of 10 stochastic simulations. The model predicts that cancer care disruptions during the COVID-19 pandemic could lead to 21 247 (2.0%) more cancer deaths in Canada in 2020 to 2030, assuming treatment capacity is recovered to 2019 prepandemic levels in 2021. This represents 355 172 life years lost expected due to pandemic-related diagnostic and treatment delays. The largest number of expected excess cancer deaths was predicted for breast, lung and colorectal cancers, and in the provinces of Ontario, Québec and British Columbia. Diagnostic and treatment capacity in 2021 onward highly influenced the number of cancer deaths over the next decade. Cancer care disruptions during the COVID-19 pandemic could lead to significant life loss; however, most of these could be mitigated by increasing diagnostic and treatment capacity in the short-term to address the service backlog.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".