So many things have changed in the past 6 months! It’s now September 2020 and COVID-19 upended our lives in March for many of us. While we all hope we can get back to normal, for now we have a new normal to navigate. This is especially true for dentistry and impacts us both clinically and administratively. Our appointments are longer so we can do additional cleaning between patients and so we don’t have overlapping patients. We now meet you at your car to handle paperwork and get your temperature and blood oxygen. We ask you to wait in your car until we are ready to seat you in the operatory (after asking you to wash your hands in the restroom) for your root canal treatment. For consults, we spend time in our waiting room (at a socially distanced 6 feet in masks) gathering information and discussing treatment options. All to say we are doing what we can to protect our patients and our staff from COVID-19. For more specific information on our office policies, see our website’s COVID-19 page.

One of the greatest challenges we face is seeing emergency patients (and the majority of our patients are people in pain needing root canal treatment). We always kept two appointments a day for emergencies and several appointments a week for urgent treatment needs. Since we have considerably fewer appointments available each week, it has become a challenge to take care of those patients in pain. Thankfully, we’ve gotten pretty good at shuffling our schedule and are better at keeping some emergency and urgent appointments each week. So far, so good in getting people out of pain. Our top priority remains taking care of our patients (in every sense of that word). If you have any questions, please call our office at 919.416.4200 or browse our website.

I also came across an article by Dr. Erin Bromage, an immunologist, that offers the best explanation (in plain English) I’ve found on why/how COVID-19 spreads and how to minimize your risk.