Dental care provision in oral medicine during covid-19 outbreak

Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) is caused by the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) infection. It has been recognized in more than 210 countries with a total of 24, 71,136 laboratory-confirmed positive cases and 1, 69,006 deaths. That is why, it has been declared as a pandemic by the Director-General of the World Health Organization. This virus is zoonotic in origin and can spread through humans by droplet infections. The virus has an incubation period of 2–14 days and is manifested clinically as fever, a nonproductive cough, sore throat, and myalgia, with dyspnea. In latter stages, it can cause acute respiratory distress leading to death of the patient. In the dental settings, there are higher chances of transmission of this virus as a result of face-to-face communication or direct transmission and contact transmission. It has resulted in the restriction of the dental services throughout the world. It has resulted in an increased number of those patients who required immediate dental treatment. Hence, through this paper we have focused on the dental care guidelines which are needed to be followed for the patients visiting the Oral Medicine department.