ABSTRACT
Defensive dentistry, defined as dental care provided by professionals, aiming primarily to prevent the risk of litigation, has become, more and more, a popular choice among practitioners, in their daily practice, over the past decade. Being divided in "positive", when performing unnecessary diagnostic tests or prescribing unnecessary treatment and "negative", when avoiding high-risk patients or risky procedures, defensive dentistry's adverse effects raised the cost and lowered the quality of the healthcare provided for patients. COVID-19 pandemic has changed the current clinical scenario in all medical practices, including dentistry, increasing the risk for performing defensive dentistry. The aim of the present paper was to bring new insights into the field of defensive dentistry and to highlight the impact of COVID-19 pandemic on patient's treatment. Pubmed/MEDLINE and Embase/SCOPUS databases have been revised for articles in English language using as keywords "defensive medicine", "defensive dentistry", and "Covid-19", "SARS-CoV-2", "Coronavirus" associated with "dentistry". The selected papers were critically assessed and corroborated with the changes occurred in the last months due to the high contagiousness of COVID-19 and the inherent risks for dental professionals, requiring multiple precautions during patient care or postponing patients treatments. Defensive dentistry need to be recognized and avoid, as possible. Dental practitioners, their team, and patients, as well, need to adapt, based on evidence-based update of medical knowledge, to the new scenario created by the COVID-19 pandemic.
ABSTRACT
The COVID-19 pandemic affected 62 million people and caused more than 1.4 million deaths globally till the end of November 2020. Our study aimed to explore the association between obesity and the negative outcomes of COVID-19 worldwide. The prevalence of obesity and overweight per country was extracted from the World Health Organization information system and, for measuring the COVID-19 negative outcomes, we calculated the cumulated notification rate and the mortality for the interval since starting of pandemic till the 29th of November 2020. We explored the linear relationship between COVID-19 and obesity by a bivariate Spearman rank correlation, interpreted using the rule of thumb for 95% level of confidence. We found globally a positive, moderate, and statistically significant correlation between prevalence of obesity and overweight and the negative outcomes of COVID-19. Some of the results found at global level were confirmed in the disaggregated analysis per WHO regions. Due to the linear association of obesity with the COVID-19 negative outcomes, effective actions are needed for keeping the health systems resilience during the COVID-19. Preventing the obese and overweight people to be infected, prioritizing access to vaccination and to adequate care and treatment could be effective.
ABSTRACT
On 24<sup>th</sup> of February 2020, the Ministry of Health in Romania announced the operationalization of the Green Line, known as Telverde, within the National Institute of Public Health, in order to provide citizens with information related to the prevention of Sars-Cov-2 infection. The number of registered calls increased considerably at the time of the declaration of the pandemic, the beginning and the cessation of the state of emergency and during the issuance of military ordinances. Different key periods were studied and compared so that we could determine if the major administrative and legislative events have influenced the number of registered calls. Our findings sustained the supposition that the major events that took place during this period have indeed influenced the number of telephone calls made to TelVerde helpline.