Thank you for your interest in our work. Just to clarify, we didn't find that there were more cancer deaths (in fact, there were slightly fewer). What we found was more concerning—that people diagnosed with cancer during 2020 and 2021 were more likely to die from cancer within a year of diagnosis.

Yes. While we didn't explicitly compare urban to rural, there's a clear difference. The effects of the pandemic on rural individuals is often overlooked because the early images we have came from large cities. But, ultimately, the pandemic widened the rural-urban gap in health outcomes.