The AMA says Australia needs to get back to routine health care, or risk a greater toll than COVID-19 will bring.

All elective surgeries and procedures have been cancelled to help prepare the health system for the impact of COVID-19; freeing up hospital beds, medical staff and personal protection equipment.

But this means many a prevented from undergoing procedures that detect cancer and other issues.

AMA vice president Chris Zappala says there will be a significant cost in terms of sickness and mortality.

“There's a large amount of everyday disease out there … we run a greater risk that curable disease becomes incurable and the backlog unmanageable,” Dr Zappala said.

The peak medical lobby says there must be a way to have routine care to resume in private hospitals and practices while public hospitals remain on standby for COVID-19 cases.

“There is considerable spare capacity within the public hospital system right now … and no-one is suggesting for a second that that should be taken away,” Dr Zappala said.

“[But] there is scope within the private system to start to loosen the restrictions straight away,” Dr Zappala said.

“There is no point in leaving the private system in paralysis as well.

“There's very little work happening and it means the governments will have to spend more money to prop up these systems.

“The most worrying concern we have is, the longer the delays in screening routine care continue, the COVID-negative sickness and mortality will be much higher than the COVID-related sickness and mortality than we're seeing.

“To us this just seems ridiculous when we have idle capacity in the private system ready to take up the slack.”

He suggested public patients could be treated in private hospitals under existing relationships.