CHARLOTTE, N.C. – Cancer screenings have decreased across the country. It is due in part to some facility postponements and closures. One Charlotte oncologist says the dramatic drop is concerning.

Neel Stallings from Charlotte said she has had two types of breast cancer and both times she defeated it.

“I credit a mammogram for saving my life twice,” Stallings said.

In both her cases she caught the cancer at stage one. It's a similar story for Angie Lee. One year her mammogram was negative, then 13 months later it was positive.

“In that short of time, it was growing, and I was lucky it wasn’t in the lymph nodes,” Lee said.

Both these women are happy to have had a mammogram when they did, but many people aren’t having cancer screenings right now due to COVID-19.

“We have seen a reduction in referrals for those conditions since the coronavirus outbreak,” the President of Oncology Specialists of Charlotte, Dr. Justin Favaro, said.

Favaro sees patients after they have a screening. He said his referrals from those screenings are down about 40 percent. But one study paints a grimmer picture. It included 2.7 million patients in April and found screening appointments for cervical, colon, and breast cancer decreased by 86 to 94 percent in March.

“I am concerned that if we are putting things off that people could present with later stage disease,” Favaro said.

It could mean those who go in for cancer screenings discover cancer in later stages and have a smaller chance of survival.

“We know that coronavirus is a very deadly virus and a tremendous number of people die from that in this country, but if you look at the numbers of people who die from cancer and heart disease those are very significant as well,” Favaro said. “We don’t want to see a spike in that.”

Favaro said he understands some facilities have postponed cancer screenings, but emphasizes that if it’s in a patient's power and that person is concerned, to make sure to have one done.

“Call your physician, they are open,” Favaro said. “They don’t want things like this to get worse.”