According to an article in the Swiss newspaper Tagesanzeiger, the CEO of Novartis (one of the world’s largest pharmaceutical companies) stated in a phone conference on quarterly financials that
“There is a dramatic decrease in the number of diagnoses of non-infectious diseases”
This is my translation of the statement in the article which is in German:
“Es gibt einen dramatischen Rückgang an Diagnosen von nicht übertragbaren Krankheiten”
The broader claim in the article is that due to the COVID-19 pandemic, people with (symptoms of) serious diseases are much less likely to see a doctor and therefore such diseases remain undiagnosed more often now, leading in particular to a “cancer epidemic”.
Question: Is there publicly available data that backs the claim of the Novartis CEO (for some definition of “dramatic”, for some given timeframe of comparison, and either globally or for specific countries)?