During California’s pandemic-related stay-at-home order from mid-March to mid-June 2020, cervical cancer screenings at a large health system in the state declined by about 80% compared with the same timespan a year earlier, recently analyzed data have shown.
Investigators from the CDC and Kaiser Permanente Southern California examined data from about 1.5 million women treated at Kaiser Permanente in 2020 and roughly the same number seen during the previous year. Cervical cancer screening rates dipped 8% for women aged 21 to 29 years during the first 2 months of 2020 compared with the same period in 2019. But during the stay-at-home order, screening rates among women in this age group dropped by 78% and remained 29% lower for the next 3 months compared with 2019 rates during the same time periods.