Week in Review: Waiting for the recovery | Stay vigilant on COVID-19 | Imaging finds toy in throat

Dear DrBicuspid Member,

How long will it take the dental industry to fully recover from the COVID-19 pandemic? It may be as long as summer or fall, according to a webinar held yesterday by the ADA's Health Policy Institute (HPI).

Dentistry's situation right now is a classic good news/bad news scenario. The good news is that about 99% of dental practices remain open. The bad news is that patient volume is at about 80% of pre-COVID-19 levels, based on the results of a survey by HPI of about 3,000 dentists.

Dentists seem to be optimistic about their prospects for recovery: 72% are very or somewhat confident that their dental practices will recover in 2021. But they also believe that it may take until summer or fall to return to normal, according to an article by Associate Editor Melissa Busch in our Business & Industry Community.

In other articles in the community, learn about the steps that states such as California and Georgia are taking to give liability protection to dentists who participate in COVID-19 vaccination programs. Also find out how oral health professionals can improve population health and read about a new think tank on oral health policy.

Stay vigilant on COVID-19

With COVID-19 vaccinations occurring in the population, many dental practices are wondering how long they will have to maintain the stringent infection control practices they adopted at the start of the pandemic. The answer? Don't ease up yet.

That's according to the California Dental Association (CDA), which issued a guidance this past week on the issue. The CDA noted that less than 1% of the population in both the U.S. and California has received the vaccine, so we are a long way from herd immunity, widely considered to be 70%.

The CDA advised dental practices to continue to be vigilant, and it also steered members to a series of YouTube videos it has produced on infection control in dentistry.

Imaging finds toy in throat

In one of the stranger cases we've encountered lately, clinicians from Florida provided a case report in which imaging was used to find a spinning-top toy swallowed by an 83-year-old woman with dementia and an oral fixation.

The 3-cm object was initially missed by radiology residents, but after the woman was admitted to the hospital a new team identified the toy in her hypopharynx using chest radiography. See the images in a story in our Imaging Community.