Volume 7 • 2020 • Issue 7

Your COVID-19 Questions Answered Dr. Aaron Burry, leader of the CDA COVID-19 Response Team, public health specialist and associate director of Professional Affairs at CDA, answered some questions in early November about dentistry in the context of COVID-19. Q This fall, there has been increase in COVID-19 cases in many places. What should we consider as we come to the end of the year? Dr. Aaron Burry (AB): Canada has done reasonably well, even during the autumn resurgence of COVID. Our government officials are trying to prevent it from spiraling out of control and they’ve been fairly successful. Three numbers are important to consider: number of new cases, number of hospitalizations and patients in intensive care units, and death rates. Many other countries are dealing with a much greater problem. There are small pockets in Canada where some of these numbers are higher than we would want them to be. From a dental perspective, I think many of us just wish that COVID was done. Gone. Over. But the reality is that we are stuck with it for the foreseeable future. We had high hopes for point-of-care tests so that we’d be able to better determine which of our patients were carrying the virus. But accurate tests haven’t materialized and they are still far from perfect. It’s very difficult to continuously provide dental care in the context of increased risk day after day. It’s exhausting. There’s a sense of fatigue from having to be on guard all the time. On the positive side, the measures we have taken in our operatories are working very well. Increased PPE and highly stringent infection prevention and control, plus screening of patients and staff, have been effective in preventing the transmission of the virus in dental offices. Q I haven’t heard reports of patients transmitting COVID to dentists or vice versa. AB: Me neither. Wearing masks, glasses and face shields provides maximum protection and, in the operatory, these things are the absolute minimum. We’ve also learned how to minimize the amount of time that patients are physically in our offices and limiting the interaction between patients. I don’t want to sound like a broken record, but the places we need to remain vigilant are outside of the operatory. Community transmission is happening in many places in Canada, so we need to be careful about when we arrive at work in the morning, in staff rooms, and other places where we might let down our guard. Wear a face shield when you are interacting with staff; each barrier layer has been shown to increase exponentially the level of protection you have from COVID. Q Do you think dentists will be able to administer vaccines? Or COVID tests? AB: That will largely depend on jurisdiction issues. I think there’s some opportunity for vaccines that are directly related to dentistry. HPV, for example, where there’s a direct relationship between oral cancers and those particular vaccines. There’s some rationale for dentists including such vaccines into their scope of practice. There’ll be lots of discussions about what will happen when we have COVID vaccine, but it’s way Dr. Aaron Burry 9 Issue 7 | 2020 | CDA at W ork