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Living and Practicing With COVID-19 Natasha A. Lee, DDS
GUEST EDITOR Natasha A. Lee, DDS, is a past president of the California Dental Association and the San Francisco Dental Society. During the pandemic she served on CDA’s COVID-19 Clinical Care Workgroup and the Governor’s State of California Business and Jobs Recovery Task Force. Dr. Lee maintains a private practice in San Francisco and is a part-time educator at her alma mater, the University of the Pacific, Arthur A. Dugoni School of Dentistry where she directs the practice management and jurisprudence curriculum. Conflict of Interest Disclosure: None reported.
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any expected the pandemic to be over by the time this issue of the Journal was to be published in February 2022. Planning began well over a year ago, and this issue was intended to provide historical documentation of what happened in dentistry during the pandemic. This was to be a follow-up issue dedicated to dentistry and COVID-19, the first having been published in October 2020, presenting articles on emerging dental science in the midst of the pandemic. However, cases of a new SARSCoV-2 variant, omicron, are skyrocketing to levels never before seen. With the possibility of other new and highly infectious variants continuing to emerge, respiratory protection is as critical as it was at the start of the pandemic, and dentists must be ever vigilant for the frequently updated practice requirements for health care settings. We have been forced to shift our thinking from waiting for things to return to the way things were to learning how to adapt to our “new normal” of living and practicing with COVID-19, with the expectation that SARS-CoV-2
will eventually become endemic. Here, authors present articles on how dentistry has responded and adapted. Richard J. Nagy, DDS, is a periodontist who served as the president of CDA in 2020. As president, one generally expects to work on behalf of CDA member dentists, supporting them in their chosen profession and their efforts to improve the oral health of their patients. In any “normal” year, this would involve collaborating with other dentist leaders and CDA’s professional staff to address issues like dental benefits plan concerns, improving access to care, providing practice support for members, offering continuing education through CDA Presents, protecting dentists through TDIC insurance products and more. But in 2020, Dr. Nagy led a state dental association of 27,000 member dentists through a pandemic while still working to address all of the other “normal” issues facing the profession. In this Journal issue, Dr. Nagy reflects on the challenges dentistry has faced during this pandemic and how organized dentistry has responded. As dental providers, we are up close and personal in the mouths of patients while generating aerosols with our dental FEBRUARY 2 0 2 2
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