As a dentist, do you support all the shutting down of dental treatment due to this nonsense? Do you think Dental Surgeries are really a hotbed of Covid transmission?
I am possibly not the best person to ask, my style has often been described as the opposite to Risk averse!
Also, as a PDS dentist, I have been working throughout in the Urgent Dental Care Centres so that may also skew my viewpoint, as will the fact that I am living and working in one of the least affect areas in the UK.
Dentistry has always worked on the principle of Universal Precautions, as such we assume that everybody might have something. Thus we have worn, gloves, eye protection, tunics, (even the shoes are proscribed) since the 80s when HIV came on the scene. Although HIV was the driver, what was noticed very quickly that dentists and nurses' experience of herpes dropped dramatically. It used to be a real occupational hazard, both in nail beds and in eyes.
So when this pandemic started, as a profession it was recognised that we were more at risk due to the nature of producing aerosols during our work,., the TLA AGP was suddenly vital to our existence. Aerosol Generating Procedures.
The initial approach was that we would divide patients into red and green pathways, similar to how it was being done elsewhere in medicine. (Covid+ and Covid-) however it was decided that in fact it should be on a procedural basis, given that we just don't know who is Covid+ or not.
For low risk procedures we will wear gloves, surgical mask, visor, plastic apron.
For high risk, gloves, FFP3 mask, visor (with foam at top to stop aerosol falling into eyes), surgical gown. It also be worn with a head covering, overshoes and at one stage we were double gloved.
So now we have lists of procedures that are definitely AGPs, those that might be and those that are probably not.
For instance if we use short blasts of our air spray we are probably safe enough but if used in a prolonged fashion then it is an AGP. However nobody will tell us what is a short burst and what is prolonged!
However, latest estimates show that since we stopped in March, there have been well over 20 million treatments less than for the same period last year (over 2 million in Scotland). For us to have continued safely with the required PPE, then it would have required a minimum of an additional 40 million complete sets of PPE for the dental teams at a time when the supply of it was already limited.
So in summary, I feel we perhaps over reacted, but then again, hindsight has shown that this was the case across the entire NHS.
I was never given an option of whether to continue to work or not. the PDS were expected to man the UDCC but For someone of my experience it was a piece of the proverbial! All those years of NBC training as a cold war warrior came flooding back.