Five years of TB progress lost due to Covid-19

The Covid-19 pandemic has had drastic consequences on the delivery of tuberculosis (TB) services, according to a new report released by charity, the Stop TB Partnership.

The report states how the global pandemic has placed limitations on diagnosis, treatment and prevention services, resulting in an expected increase in deaths over the next five years due to TB.

A modelling study of high burden settings, including India, the Republic of Kenya and Ukraine, shows that a three-month lockdown, followed by a protracted 10-month restoration of services, would cause an additional 6.3 million cases of TB between 2020 and 2025 and an additional 1.4 million TB deaths during that same period.

Based off of these figures, the study estimates that the global impact of TB in 2021 would increase to cases and deaths last seen between 2013 and 2016, implying a setback of at least five to eight years.

“We never learn from mistakes. For the past five years, TB, a respiratory disease, has remained the biggest infectious disease killer because the ‘TB agenda’ consistently became less visible in front of other priorities,” said Dr Lucica Ditiu, executive director of the Stop TB Partnership. “Today, governments face a torturous path, navigating between the imminent disaster of Covid-19 and the long-running plague of TB. But choosing to ignore TB again would erase at least half a decade of hard-earned progress against the world’s most deadly infection and make millions more people sick.”

The charity is now calling on national governments to take immediate steps to ensure diagnostic, treatment and prevention services for TB continue during the lockdown. More so, the Stop TB partnership states how a massive catch-up effort is also needed to actively diagnose, trace, treat and prevent TB.

In particular, the charity hopes to return to levels last set out during a UN General Assembly (UNGA) High-Level Meeting on TB in 2018. Following that meeting, governments scaled up their TB response resulting in an additional 600,000 people who could access TB care.

The new study was commissioned by the Stop TB Partnership in collaboration with the Imperial College, Avenir Health and Johns Hopkins University, and was supported by the United States Agency for International Development (USAID).