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. 2022 Apr 20;19(9):4971.
doi: 10.3390/ijerph19094971.

How the COVID-19 Pandemic Affects Risk Awareness in Dentists: A Scoping Review

Thomas Gerhard Wolf  1   2 , Leonardo de Col  1 , Seyed Ahmad Banihashem Rad  1 , Paolo Castiglia  3   4 , Antonella Arghittu  3   4 , Mina Cannavale  5 , Guglielmo Campus  1   3
Affiliations

How the COVID-19 Pandemic Affects Risk Awareness in Dentists: A Scoping Review

Thomas Gerhard Wolf et al. Int J Environ Res Public Health. .

Abstract

Dentists are on the frontline of infection, especially when it comes to respiratory viruses like the new coronavirus. The purpose of this paper is to conduct a scoping review to better understand dentists' risk awareness, awareness of COVID-19 symptoms, preventive measures, and effective methods of COVID-19 infection prevention and management. This paper systematically assesses the published literature on dentistry and COVID-19. Various electronic databases including Ovid MEDLINE, Scopus, Embase, and MEDLINE via PubMed were searched up to 9 September 2021. Overall, 39 papers were included. Almost the entirety of dentists (94.5%) reported awareness of the three most common COVID-19 symptoms, and a risk awareness score of about 90% was shown, while 88.2% of dentists reported adopting preventive measures. More than 50% did not want to treat infected people. While 70.3% of dentists recommended usage of N95 masks, the rate of dentists using them was below 40%. Sufficient awareness of risks during the pandemic was found in dentists. Although they were using preventive measures, there remains upside potential for adopting all recommended measures. Further, the usage of N95 masks is improvable, even though the benefit of wearing them could not be confirmed.

Keywords: COVID-19; dentist; dentistry; review; risk awareness.

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Conflict of interest statement

The authors declare no conflict of interest.

Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1
Flow Chart of the search procedure.
Figure 2
Figure 2
Shows a map of countries with the scores of how many dentists were willing to treat COVID-19 affected subjects in evaluated papers [20,23,29,32,41,47,49,56,57,61].
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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