Serious illnesses like heart and kidney disease, diabetes and mental illness have got worse because much treatment became impossible during lockdowns, according to doctors who specialise in chronic conditions.
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"We are seeing a surge in the illnesses themselves and the complications of them," Simon Jiang, a kidney specialist at Canberra Hospital and the ANU, said.
"During COVID, lots of research stopped or slowed, and because of the slowdown in research, we've had a slowdown in evidence related to the care of patients," Professor Nick Brown of the University of Canberra said.
There were two problems: laboratory testing and research had to stop for periods when the pandemic was at its worst, and patients with serious illness kept away from hospitals for fear of catching COVID.
Dr Jiang's treatment of patients needs mice, for example, but mice were not available because the people who normally looked after them were in lockdown. This meant that essential laboratory analysis to discover what exactly was wrong with patients couldn't be done.
"All those things that we were using to understand what was going on, we had to just wind them down. That was a big source of frustration because the patients are still unwell," Dr Jiang said.
It is impossible to know if people died because of the constraints on the treatment of long-running conditions like kidney failure. All Dr Jiang can say is that he was trying to prevent patients' condition deteriorating so much that they would need dialysis - but they ended up on dialysis machines.
"It's very hard to say for sure that I would have been able to stop that from happening but certainly some patients ended up on dialysis who we were trying to prevent from going on dialysis."
On top of this halt in laboratory analysis, patients also stayed away from hospitals and surgeries. "We are seeing a surge in the illnesses themselves because people just stayed away, and we are now grappling with a post-COVID surge in chronic disease that hasn't been managed," Dr Jiang said.
Professor Brown's field is different. He works with young people, aged 16 to 25, who have serious psychotic conditions, those with hallucinations and delusions.
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A lot of the treatment meant meeting them, but that had to be halted. "We weren't allowing our PhD students and our researchers to get in front of patients because there was too high a risk around that, so a lot of research slowed or stopped dramatically," he said.
"All of that research had to stop, and all of that intervention not only slowed but was not available to a group of young Canberrans who could have directly benefitted from that intervention."
On top of the unquantifiable, slow-burn of the pandemic damage, the health service in Canberra continues to be stretched to the limit. Canberra Hospital emergency department has been under "extreme pressure", according to Cathie O'Neill, Canberra Health Services Chief Operating Officer.
"Our hospitals are currently experiencing bed block every day with a large number of patients requiring longer hospital stays."
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Steve Evans
Steve Evans is a reporter on The Canberra Times. He's been a BBC correspondent in New York, London, Berlin and Seoul and the sole reporter/photographer/paper deliverer on The Glen Innes Examiner in country New South Wales. "All the jobs have been fascinating - and so it continues."
Steve Evans is a reporter on The Canberra Times. He's been a BBC correspondent in New York, London, Berlin and Seoul and the sole reporter/photographer/paper deliverer on The Glen Innes Examiner in country New South Wales. "All the jobs have been fascinating - and so it continues."
