Timely pediatric cancer diagnoses: An unexpected casualty of the COVID‐19 surge

The waiting room and halls of the pediatric outpatient clinic at the Dana‐Farber Cancer Institute are tempered by an unfamiliar calm. A thick plexiglass shield guards the front desk, floor tape demarcates a safe distance, and patients and families float in and out of invisibly bound spheres of social isolation. The quiet is unsettling, while partially by design and the product of rapid implementation of virtual visits and direct‐to‐floor admissions to limit exposures and clinic volume, there is the unspoken recognition of a decline in new patient diagnoses correlating all too closely with the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID‐19) quarantine.

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