lockdown cancer
© (R) Facebook / Romir Hall
A British man has told RT that he now has a higher chance of dying from cancer due to delays in NHS treatment amid the Covid-19 pandemic. He had to wait three months for a scan that revealed life-threatening tumors in his body.

Sherwin Hall, 27, told RT that he began suffering from pain in the groin area in March, just when the number of coronavirus infections in Britain was surging. The father-of-two quickly went to a hospital in Leeds asking for a scan, but the staff refused.

"They told me 'No, due to Covid-19 we're not giving scans'," Hall recalled, adding that doctors put him on a waiting list, and prescribed anti-inflammatory drugs and painkillers instead.

lockdown victim
The pain only grew, becoming "excruciating." Hall visited the hospital multiple times, and at one point was told that the pain was caused by prostatitis, a condition in which the prostate gland is inflamed. But all of his pleas for a scan were declined, so he "ended up waiting and waiting."
Between May and early June, I went to the hospital 13 times. They gave me the exact same treatment - painkillers, and you're off. I begged for a scan every single time I went there. Every single time I went there, they told me that due to Covid-19 there is a delay on MRIs and CT scans.
On his 14th visit, Hall finally managed to get a scan, which revealed a 14cm (5.5-inch) malignant tumor in his pelvis and 30 small tumors in his lungs. He has since been undergoing chemotherapy, and has started an online fundraising campaign to seek treatment in the US.

Hall believes that he would have had a better chance of survival if his condition had been discovered before the tumor started to spread.
[The doctors] could have been able to operate on the primary tumor and get it out of me, and I would have been on a road to recovery right now.
The young man admits that the NHS was overwhelmed during the early days of the outbreak, but wants officials not to use Covid-19 as a "smokescreen" for failing to take care of other patients.

"I just wish that there would have been a better system of diagnosing early, saving lives," Hall told RT.

"I have a 14-week-old baby, and I don't know how long I'm going to have with him. And I'm 27 years old, in the prime of my life."