Many didn’t get back on schedule even after clinics reopened.

The new study shows the effect may have been greatest in areas where such care is already likely falling behind experts’ recommendations.

Researchers looked at screenings for breast cancer, cervical cancer, and sexually transmitted infections (STI), as well as two types of birth control care: prescriptions for oral contraceptives and insertions of longer-acting devices.

For all of 2020, adult women covered by Michigan’s largest private health insurer were 20% to 30% less likely to receive these services than they were in 2019.

As expected, there was a sharp drop in most such care during Michigan’s first pandemic peak in March and April 2020. That includes the weeks when the state’s public health orders paused all non-essential health care, and many health clinics closed, to reduce the risk of coronavirus transmission and free up health providers for the surge of a brand-new disease caused by a little-understood virus.

But even after clinics reopened, there was no added increase in these services during the rest of the year to make up for lost time.

From July 2020 to the end of the year, women got most of these kinds of care at pre-pandemic levels, but not at higher levels that would catch up on missed care.

“This recovery to baseline levels, but not above them, means a group of women missed these services all year. The question is, what will that mean for them over the longer term?” says Nora Becker, a primary care doctor at Michigan Medicine, the University of Michigan’s academic medical center, and lead author of the study in JAMA Health Forum.

“We don’t know yet whether they have caught up in 2021, but we will need to keep looking at the data as they become available.”

Read the full article about missing preventive care at Futurity.