Abstract
Abstract
 The COVID 19 disease caused by SARS-CoV-2 virus has become a subject of international concern due to its contagious nature and mortality rate. The lack of any definitive treatment also contributes to the severity of the disease. Identification of susceptible dental patient is the first and most important step of all preventive protocols. Categorization of the patients through a questionnaire will help the dentist to follow and modify preventive protocols accordingly. The various comorbidities which make an individual more susceptible to COVID 19 infection were identified through a thorough systematic review of literature. The questionnaire is derived from the studied literature and assigned a score. The generated aggregate of the score is used to categorize dental patient into low, medium and high risk groups. The reviewed literatures were collected from reputed online open access journals and subscribed journals. Dentists being the most vulnerable professionals during this COVID 19 pandemic should practice different preventive protocols. This is also required to limit nosocomial spread of infection through dental setup. Characteristics of the virus and the subsequent infection have also been discussed in brief in this systematic review for better understanding of the various protective protocols.
 Key words – COVID 19; Questionnaire; Susceptibility; Scoring; Dental patient; Prevention.
Highlights
In the late December of 2019 a cluster of patients with a respiratory disease mainly characterized by pneumonia and associated symptoms were reported in the Wuhan province of China [1]
The highly infectious nature of the viral pathogen affected number of people worldwide since December 2019 [5] and WHO declared the outbreak as a Public Health Emergency of International Concern (PHEIC) on 30th January 2020 [6]
The Case Fatality Rate (CFR) has been calculated as 0.4% for individuals aged between 40 years to 49 years but sharply increases to 14.8% for individuals aged above 80 [9]
Summary
In the late December of 2019 a cluster of patients with a respiratory disease mainly characterized by pneumonia and associated symptoms were reported in the Wuhan province of China [1]. The causative pathogen did not correspond to any known strain of virus and on 8th January of 2020, the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention declared it, as a new type of corona virus through genome analysis [2]. It was termed as 2019-nCoV and later the International Committee on Taxonomy of Viruses (ICTV) named it SARS-CoV-2 [3]. The incubation period of the SARS-CoV-2 virus is about 5 – 6 days for most individuals but it may get. Upon performance of Chest Computed Tomography (Chest CT) bilateral pneumonia, with ground-glass opacity and bilateral patchy shadows were observed and the findings were consistent for most of the patients [32]
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