Blood cancer patients made up 1 in 20 of all deaths caused by COVID19 between October and December 2021. This was twice as high a proportion of COVID19 deaths than the average proportion from the whole pandemic before then. It is very possible that this trend in the UK may also be being replicated elsewhere but I am not aware of other similar datasets.

There has clearly been a steep rise in the risk to blood cancer patients in the UK, and there seems little reason to suspect that this will reduce on its own, especially given the fact it is becoming harder to protect yourself from the risk of infection as restrictions are lifted. Vaccines do not work as well for many people with blood cancer.

This all amounts to a staggering ten times greater risk of having died from COVID19 than that of the general population during the last three months of last year. This is based on a simple calculation comparing the risk observed with the proportion of the population who have blood cancer (300,000 out of 67 Million in the UK). In other words ten times more people with blood cancer died of COVID19 in the last three months of last year than we would have predicted based on the death rate in the population as a whole. During the whole pandemic more than 1 in 100 people in the UK with blood cancer had died of COVID19 by the end of last year. Over 3500 of the 300,000 people with blood cancer in the UK have died, over 1 in 100, which is a staggering number given how carefully many of us have been shielding.

What is not clear is the impact omicron is having on this, though anecdotally many blood cancer patients have reported infections with COVID19 in the last month and a half after this data set ends, and it seems that omicron, whilst often mild in a vaccinated healthy individual, is not always mild in someone with a damaged immune system.

Since treatment of Covid19 with monoclonal antibodies or certain antivirals is believed to reduce the risk of serious illness or death by around 80% from clinical trials, we would hope that the death rate in blood cancer patients will go down as these medicines become more readily available. It is not yet fully clear, however, as we must remember these figures come from studies which will not have included many who have blood cancer. We hope these medications will save our lives, but only time and more data will confirm this. It is also vital that the current barriers to obtaining these medicines are removed.

It does seems likely that the single most important factor may well turn out to be those of us who do not respond well to vaccines being given the new long acting monoclonal antibodies, the first example of which is known by its trade name as Evusheld. This is not yet being used in the UK, and is in short supply in the USA where it has been launched. It will presumably be particularly important for those whose immune systems do not make antibodies in response to vaccines. It is important to accelerate the use of these monoclonal antibodies since they seem to often have a shelf life, with several of them becoming ineffective as COVID19 mutates into new variants. We rushed vaccines to peoples arms, we should be doing the same with monoclonal antibodies. In my own personal view, antivirals should be given in combination with the monoclonals since they work in different ways. In the UK the way to have a chance of receiving both treatments at once is to ask the NHS for the monoclonal antibodies, and also volunteer for the Panoramic trial.

I was alerted to this sad statistic by the following quote from the Guardian

I tracked down the data on the ONS website, and created the following spreadsheet, using some simple calculations and a couple of basic graphs. This shows the way the death rate of blood cancer patients as a fraction of the total deaths have been going up in recent months.

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