Newly diagnosed cancer and the COVID-19 pandemic: tumour stage migration and higher early mortality.

Background: We compared the new outpatient clinic referrals during the first 10 months of the COVID-19 pandemic with the year before.

Methods: We compared baseline characteristics of the 2208 new referrals in 2020 (n=922) and 2019 (n=1286) with Χ and Mann-Whitney U tests and calculated ORs with binary logistic regression. To evaluate the expected changes in the cancer survival secondary to stage migration, we used the 5-year survival data of Survival, Epidemiology and End Results (SEER) Program 2010-2016.