The impact of the COVID-19 epidemic on the utilization of emergency dental services

Background/Purpose: To assess how the current COVID-19 epidemic influenced peoples' utilization of emergency dental services in Beijing, China. Methods: The first-visit patients seeking emergency dental services before or at the beginning of the COVID-19 epidemic were retrieved. Their demographic characteristics and the reasons for visiting were recorded and analyzed. Results: There were 2,537 patients involved in this study. Thirty-eight percent fewer patients visited the dental urgency at the beginning of the COVID-19 epidemic than before. The distribution of dental problems has changed significantly. The proportion of dental and oral infection raised from 51.0% of pre-COVID-1 9 to 71.9% during COVID-19, and dental trauma decreased from 14.2% to 10.5%. Meanwhile, the non-urgency cases reduced to three-tenths of pre-COVID-19. Conclusion: Within the limitation of this study, the COVID-19 epidemic had a strong influence on the utilization of emergency dental services. (c) 2020 Association for Dental Sciences of the Republic of China. Publishing services by Elsevier B.V. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons. org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/).