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Editorial
. 2021 Nov;31(6):2789-2793.
doi: 10.1177/11206721211018641. Epub 2021 May 27.

Impact on refractive surgery due to increasing use of personal protection equipment: Insights from EUROCOVCAT group

Arthur B Cummings  1 , Cian Gildea  1 , Antoine P Brézin  2 , Boris E Malyugin  3 , Ozlem Evren Kemer  4 , Omid Kermani  5 , Isabel Prieto  6 , Robert Rejdak  7 , Miguel A Teus  8 , Daniele Tognetto  9 , Sandrine Zweifel  10 , Mario D Toro  10   11
Affiliations
Editorial

Impact on refractive surgery due to increasing use of personal protection equipment: Insights from EUROCOVCAT group

Arthur B Cummings et al. Eur J Ophthalmol. 2021 Nov.

Abstract

Since the World Health Organization declared COVID-19 to be a pandemic on 11th March 2020, changes to social and sanitary practices have included significant issues in access and management of eye care during the COVID-19 pandemic. Additionally, the fear of loss, coupled with social distancing, lockdown, economic instability, and uncertainty, have led to a significant psychosocial impact that will have to be addressed. In the current COVID-19 pandemic, personal protective equipment such as face masks or face coverings have become a daily necessity. While "mass masking" along with hand hygiene and social distancing became more widespread, new issues began to emerge - particularly in those who wore spectacles as a means of vision correction. As we began to see routine patients again after the first lockdown had been lifted, many patients visited our clinics for refractive surgery consultations with a primary motivating factor of wanting spectacle independence due to the fogging of their spectacles as a result of wearing a mask. In this article, we report on new emerging issues in eye care due to the widespread use of masks and on the new unmet need in the corneal and cataract refractive surgery fields.

Keywords: COVID-19 pandemic; LASIK; Mask wearing; cataract surgery; fogging spectacles; refractive lens exchange; refractive surgery.

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Conflict of interest statement

Declaration of conflicting interests: The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

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