When COVID hit, healthcare systems around the world were turned upside down. Hospitals cleared beds, routine appointments were cancelled and people were told to stay at home unless it was urgent. In England, visits to family doctors and hospital admissions for non-COVID reasons fell by a third in the early months of the pandemic. Medical staff were redeployed, routine clinics were cancelled and diagnostic tests were postponed.
Against this backdrop, the number of people newly diagnosed with long-term health conditions fell sharply, as our new study, published in the BMJ, has found. My colleagues and I used anonymised health data for nearly 30 million people in England to evaluate what happened to new diagnoses across a wide range of chronic diseases.
