Is the tuberculosis response another casualty of COVID-19?

On Sept 8, 2021, the 20th anniversary Results Report of The Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria was published under a headline that encapsulated longstanding fears: “the COVID-19 pandemic had a devastating impact on the fight against HIV, TB and malaria in 2020”. This outlined the first decline in programmatic results in the history of the Global Fund. The scale of this impact on tuberculosis in 2020, was a 19% decrease in the number of people treated for drug-resistant tuberculosis in the countries receiving Global Fund support and a 37% decrease in people treated for extensively drug-resistant tuberculosis.