Introduction: Living and Practicing with COVID-19

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.

Many 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 SARS- CoV-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 equipment and instruments. Likewise, patients are exposed to us at very close range. Despite the aerosol risk, dentistry’s enhanced precautions and infection control standards have protected both dental providers and patients extremely well. Eve Cuny, MS, infection control expert and executive associate dean at the University of the Pacific, Arthur A. Dugoni School of Dentistry, discusses how infection control standards have changed in dentistry in modern times, first in response to the HIV epidemic and now in response to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Many years ago, CDA recognized the importance of data collection and analysis to aid in understanding the changing dental environment, future forecasting and evidence-based decision-making. Anders Bjork, MBA, is CDA’s vice president of strategic intelligence and analytics. He presents information on the financial impact of the pandemic on dentistry and the possible longer-term economic effects.

Jay Kumar, DDS, MPH, is the state dental director, a position created several years ago as a direct result of advocacy efforts by CDA. Here, Dr. Kumar writes about his role during the pandemic as the head of the California Department of Public Health’s Office of Oral Health, touching on topics spanning from guidance for health care delivery in dental-specific settings, to concerns about how the pandemic has created additional barriers for many with limited access to oral health care, to equitable vaccination distribution within the state.

While the articles in this issue help tell the story of how the dental profession was affected by the pandemic, the story is not yet over, nor are these the last articles that will be written about dentistry and COVID-19. In a decade, we will be able to look back at what is written in this issue to understand what occurred during this crisis, but for now we can also look forward to new opportunities, advances in science and research and creative and innovative developments that will surely be the result of our learning from this pandemic.