‘It Just Seems Like My Patients Are Sicker’
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. 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. Then the pandemic hit, and he decided that going to the hospital wasn’t worth the risk of getting COVID. So he put it off … and put it off. “The next time I saw him, in early 2022, he required hospice care,” Laura told me. He died shortly after. 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.)
Early 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. But the health-care delays didn’t just end when America began to reopen in the summer of 2020. Patients were putting off health care through the end of the first pandemic year, when vaccines weren’t yet widely, at which point much of the country seemed to be moving on from COVID.
