Stuttgart (dpa/lsw) – According to accounting data from the Barmer health insurance company, significantly fewer people in the southwest received a cancer diagnosis during the corona pandemic in 2020 than in previous years. According to a spokeswoman, however, this is probably due to the fact that fewer people went to the doctor for fear of corona, which meant that new cases went undetected. State manager Winfried Plötze described this as a dramatic development. The corona pandemic should not prevent anyone from going to the early detection examinations regularly.
“In Baden-Württemberg, the number of new cases diagnosed in the first year of the pandemic was 32 percent below the average cancer incidence for the years 2017 to 2019,” said Plötze on Wednesday in Stuttgart. For the analysis, the health insurance company evaluated how often the insured had skin, breast and prostate cancer as well as carcinoma of the digestive organs and female genital organs. Accordingly, in the period under consideration, the diagnosis rate for skin cancer fell by 51 percent and for breast cancer by 35 percent.
