Updating the metadata performs this subquery (in a bigger update query) which performs a full table scan, making all my crawlers much slower (and making the tasks timeout)

SELECT count(*) FROM request_queue_records
WHERE request_queue_id = 'AO2Uinca6RHO1Mo6X'
AND is_handled IS true

With the other two subqueries it also happens:

SELECT count(*) FROM request_queue_records
        WHERE request_queue_id = 'AO2Uinca6RHO1Mo6X'
          AND is_handled IS false

SELECT count(*) FROM request_queue_records
        WHERE request_queue_id = 'AO2Uinca6RHO1Mo6X'

this is a bottleneck as all crawler instances want to update this row at the same time + the query is slow.
Besides adding an index which would make the query much faster, is there the option to not update this metadata? Is it used for something?
Thi