Did You Think Covid SOPs Were Excessive? Perhaps You Were Right!
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- Published: Monday, 19 December 2022 08:43
- Written by Guy Tuggle
- Hits: 1838
Fallow time. Face masks for all. Patients locked out, queuing in the cold. Interminable screening questions. Donning and Doffing (with allocated zones and ‘how to’ posters on the wall). FFP3. Telephone triaging. Aerosol procedures…
If all the above seems like ages ago, well, it’s been barely a year since it was the norm.
Dental clinicians, because they work in close proximity to people’s airways and undertake aerosol generating procedures, were deemed to be at a high risk of catching Covid. And in the early days of the pandemic, before vaccines were establishing themselves in the fightback, there was genuine and understandable fear amongst many in the profession.
But with the benefit of hindsight, lessons will be learned. There were always those who thought the SOPs imposed on the profession were overkill, and their position may be about to be vindicated.
The Harvard Gazette, on 13th December reported on a new paper “Evaluation of Comprehensive COVID-19 Testing Program outcomes in a US Dental Clinical Care Academic Setting” published in JAMA Network Open which reveals that “in fact clinical activities did not increase the risk of COVID-19 when performed in a clinical care setting with practitioners wearing standard personal protective equipment and participating in comprehensive SARS-CoV-2 surveillance testing”.
The journal’s report continued “The study was conducted at Harvard School of Dental Medicine (HSDM), an academic clinical care setting, between August 2020 and February 2022. As part of Harvard University’s mandatory testing program, all onsite HSDM faculty, staff, and students participated in regular surveillance testing with a cadence that varied from one to three times per week depending on risk status. This provided a pool of individuals in both clinical and non-clinical roles who were tested for SARS-CoV-2 on a frequent basis.
“Our study found that the overall asymptomatic test positivity rate remained low at 0.27 percent. Being involved in clinical activities did not increase the risk of COVID-19; while individuals involved in clinical activities performed a higher number of tests per week on average, test positivity rate remained lower than non-clinical individuals, ensuring safety of both patients and practitioners at clinical settings, said Sung Choi, HSDM instructor in Oral Health Policy and Epidemiology, and an author of the study.
According to the study, the mean test positivity rate was 0.25% among individuals involved in patient-facing clinical activities compared with 0.36 percent among nonclinical individuals, revealing that faculty, students, and staff working in non-clinical roles contracted SARS-CoV-2 infections slightly more often than those in clinical-facing roles”.
“We were pleased that the comprehensive SARS-CoV-2 surveillance program at Harvard kept our community safe,” said Giang T. Nguyen, associate provost for campus health and wellbeing, executive director of Harvard University Health Services, and contributor to the study. “The work done at the dental school during the pandemic demonstrated that the school delivered clinical care in a safe manner, even in a setting with relatively high density of students, staff, and faculty on campus”
HSDM Dean William Giannobile said. “The delivery of dental care to patients during the pandemic was safe with no documented transmission of SARS-CoV-2 from doctor to patient.”
GDPUK will continue to monitor and stimulate discussion of the efficacy of infection control procedures introduced in response to the Covid pandemic. We will do so constructively with the safety of clinicians and their patients at the heart of our concerns.
covid SOP
The control measures are stated as being "While dental care workers at HSDM used N95 masks and plexiglass shields, aerosol mitigation with aerosol-generating procedures, and physical distancing, the environment was considered safe and there were no documented cases of clinician-to-patient transmission "covid sop
I am not sure it supports the statement in the title at all. This was all done after the start of the pandemic with appropriate PPE and shows that the protocols put in place worked- not that they were not needed.To quote from the authors.
"Meaning These findings suggest that involvement in patient-facing dental clinical activities did not pose additional risk of SARS-CoV-2 infection compared with other in-person activities in the presence of INTENSIVE CONTROL MEASURES."
my capitals
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