How COVID and Cancer Led to Deaths in 2020

Every list of people most vulnerable to severe COVID-19 includes people with cancer. Cancer itself (particularly blood cancers) and treatments for it can weaken the immune system so much that even vaccination can’t lift immunity as high as in people without cancer. A new research letter in JAMA Oncology looked at the deaths of more than 16,000 people in the U.S. who had both cancer and COVID in 2020, during the pre-vaccine pandemic months when cancer care was disrupted. Separating out each disease as the underlying or contributing cause, the researchers determined that 3,142 cancer deaths had COVID as a contributing cause and 13, 419 COVID deaths had cancer as a contributing cause.