“I have lost a lot of patients on the wait list,” said Wijeysundera, an interventional cardiologist who also heads cardiac care at Toronto’s Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre. “Patients have died because we’ve had to make decisions about who is the person we have to treat first … Those patients and their families deserve recognition that they are victims of this pandemic, too.”
In fact, soon-to-be-published data indicates that twice as many Ontarians with heart ailments passed away waiting for surgery during the pandemic than before COVID-19 hit, he said.
According to Ontario’s Financial Accountability Office, the province’s surgical backlog will have reached 419,000 by September. Erasing that deficit will take $1.1 billion and three and a half years, the office estimated in a recent report.
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