Advanced cancers returned to prepandemic levels, according to a reassuring report

AP News – Tuesday, April 22, 2025
By Carla K. Johnson

Many Americans were forced to postpone cancer screenings — colonoscopies, mammograms and lung scans — for several months in 2020 as COVID-19 overwhelmed doctors and hospitals.

But that delay in screening isn’t making a huge impact on cancer statistics, at least none that can be seen yet by experts who track the data.

Cancer death rates continue to decline, and there weren’t huge shifts in late diagnoses, according to a new report published Monday in the journal Cancer. It’s the broadest-yet analysis of the pandemic’s effect on U.S. cancer data.

Click here to read the entire article.