Speaking to Lusa, oncologist Vítor Veloso said that “the results will be dramatic, as most of these patients are no longer curable, they will have a very short survival and poor quality of life”.

“The treatment will be more violent, it will cost the State, it will involve a greater number of health professionals and the results will be inadequate, because what we want are cures, long survivals and a great quality of life, and that will not happen anytime soon”, he stated.

Vítor Veloso said he was “hopeful” that those responsible “look at cancer patients and see that these individuals were poorly treated, ignored and that it is necessary to get down to work to give them what they are entitled to and which is constitutionally enshrined”.

Citing data from the Transparency Portal of the National Health Service (SNS), the president of the North Nucleus of the Portuguese League against Cancer said that “more than 13 million face-to-face contacts were not made at the level of primary care between March 2020 and November of 2021”.

“There were 500,000 surgeries cancelled in hospitals, 3.8 million emergency episodes in hospitals that did not happen, there were 1.2 million hospitalisations that were not performed. All because of the Covid-19 pandemic, he stressed.

He recalled that, “unlike chronic diseases, which are also highly penalised, cancer cannot wait, cancer has a timing and if this timing is not met, it represents a situation that goes from a cure to death”.