Surgeon General fears too much COVID focus distracts from fighting other ailments

Even as U.S. approval of a second COVID-19 vaccine appears imminent, the U.S. Surgeon General is worried that so much emphasis on fighting the coronavirus has led to health deterioration in other areas because of neglect.

“One of the concerns I have is that there’s such a focus on the pandemic that many people are forgetting that individuals are dying from uncontrolled blood pressure, they're dying from maternal mortality, one in four women missed their prenatal care appointment,” U.S. Surgeon General Dr. Jerome Adams told Just the News AM television program on Thursday.

Adams highlighted a recent report issued by his office titled “The Surgeon General’s Call to Action to Improve Maternal Health,” an issue that has taken a backseat as coronavirus concerns crowd out the news cycle. 

“A woman dies every 12 hours for pregnancy-related complications in the United States, but two thirds of these are preventable,” Adams told Just the News, saying his goal with the report was “to make the U.S. the safest place on the planet to give birth.”

Adams’ concerns about COVID-19 (a disease with now a sharp drop in mortality among those who catch it, in part due to greater knowledge of disease treatment) dominating all other health matters have been echoed elsewhere.

A September report by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that “By June 30, 2020, because of concerns about COVID-19, an estimated 41% of U.S. adults had delayed or avoided medical care including urgent or emergency care (12%) and routine care (32%). Avoidance of urgent or emergency care was more prevalent among unpaid caregivers for adults, persons with underlying medical conditions, Black adults, Hispanic adults, young adults, and persons with disabilities.”

The CDC warned that “Delayed or avoided medical care might increase morbidity and mortality associated with both chronic and acute health conditions.”

Noting the CDC study, the American Hospital Association said in a statement that “such deferrals are putting lives at risk unnecessarily during the COVID-19 public health emergency and urges patients to seek necessary care, noting that many hospitals have posted information on their websites about how patients are protected from COVID-19 when they seek care.”

Dr. Jay Bhattacharya is one of the three authors of the The Great Barrington Declaration, a document signed onto by more than 3,500 medical professionals calling for the "devastating" coronavirus lockdown policies to be lifted and replaced with a new, less restrictive strategy.

 Bhattacharya, a professor of medicine at Stanford University and a research associate at the National Bureau of Economics Research, told Just the News AM in an interview that during the early stages of the pandemic, there were legitimate concerns about hospitals being overcrowded.

“When there was a lot of uncertainty about hospitals overcrowding, that made some sense. But we very quickly learned in the United States anyways, that only very few places had any risk of a hospital being overrun. The vast majority of the country, the hospitals were closed up at great harm to health with absolutely no--when they were facing absolutely no risk of being overrun--whatsoever.” 

Bhattacharya, who directs Stanford's Center for Demography and Economics of Health and Aging, said the fear of either contracting the coronavirus has also frightened people away from getting needed preventative care.

“And as a consequence, what we've had is people who have had heart attacks that didn't come in, that died at home, people with strokes who died at home,” Bhattacharya said. “People who are so afraid of COVID that they skip their chemotherapy, they're more afraid of COVID than cancer. They skip their mammograms, they skip their prostate cancer screening or colonoscopies. We're going to see a rise in cancer death as a result of the lockdowns. People also skipped immunizations for their children. The lockdown costs have been absolutely enormously devastating for health."