Commentary: Eye banking in post-COVID-19 era.

Abstract

The COVID-19 (Coronavirus Disease 2019) pandemic with its multiple waves of infection has affected the normalcy of our day-to-day lives with its high infectivity and the associated mortality, especially among healthcare workers. With the progression of the pandemic, our understanding of the disease’s natural course, modes of infection, and transmissibility have evolved with time and the subsequent guidelines to reduce the spread of the infection have been modified accordingly. The annual collection of corneas and their utilization in India were significantly inadequate to address the backlog of treatable corneal blindness even before the pandemic.[1] This pandemic and its aftermath have affected eye banking in particular with a reduction in donors, potential risk of transmission to the healthcare workers during corneal retrieval and processing, and the possible risk of transmission of infection to the recipient through the donor cornea, and thereby, causing an increase in the backlog of treatable corneal blindness.[2] Also, the nationwide lockdown reduced the travel of patients to seek healthcare for non-emergency eye care procedures.[3] Over the course of this pandemic, our understanding of the disease and the pathogen has evolved, leading to modifications in the guidelines for cornea retrieval.[24] With the subsequent reduction in the number of infections, our government relaxed the lockdown guidelines in a staged manner. This helped the patients seeking eye care for emergency and non-emergency ophthalmic diseases to reach out to the eye care centers and get appropriate treatment. It is encouraging to see that eye banking and keratoplasty have been on the rise in most centers to pre-COVID-19 levels in India following the decline in the COVID-19 cases.[5] However, there is still a significant backlog of patients requiring keratoplasty and an imminent third wave of the pandemic can further worsen it. It is the responsibility of the corneal surgeons and the eye banks to reduce this backlog as we crawl toward normalcy day by day.