Written by | Wang Cong
Edited | Wang Duoyu
Typography | Water written
In January 2020, at the beginning of the outbreak of the new crown epidemic, Professor Wang Guangfa, director of the Department of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine of Peking University First Hospital, as a member of the expert group of the National Health Commission to Wuhan, contracted the new crown virus during a visit to new crown patients in Wuhan. Professor Wang Guangfa said in his analysis of the causes of his own disease that he did not wear goggles (wearing N95 masks) during the hospital fever clinic, so the new crown virus is likely to infect himself through the conjunctiva of the eyes.
In February 2020, Wei Yiping, chief physician of the Department of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine of the Second Affiliated Hospital of Nanchang University, went to support Zengdu Hospital in Suizhou City, Hubei Province, and when investigating hospitalized patients with confirmed COVID-19, Wei Yiping found that the proportion of hospitalized COVID-19 patients who wear glasses for a long time every day is much lower than that of the general population.
In September 2020, Wei Yiping published the above findings in JAMA's sub-journal JAMA Ophthalmology, titled Association of Daily Wear of Eyeglasses With Susceptibility to Coronavirus Disease 2019 Infection.
The research team surveyed all 276 COVID-19 patients hospitalized in Suizhou between January 27 and March 13, 2020, and the proportion of these patients wearing glasses every day was only 5.8%, far lower than the 31.5% of the local population's myopia.
These data suggest that people who wear glasses every day are less likely to contract COVID-19, suggesting that the eyes may be an important route of COVID-19 infection. In addition, wearing glasses can also prevent or prevent the wearer from touching the eyes with their hands, thus avoiding the spread of the virus from the hands to the eyes.
However, the study was a single-center study with a small sample size and a limited number of patients wearing glasses for a long time, which limits the expansion of this result to a larger population and therefore needs to be validated by a large sample of multicentre studies.
Researchers at University College London recently published a research paper in the preprint medRxiv titled Glasses and risk of COVID-19 transmission - analysis of the Virus Watch Community Cohort study.
This large-scale survey of 19,166 people showed that 22.99% of people who never wore ordinary glasses were infected with COVID-19, but only 15.63% of people who wore glasses regularly were infected. After adjusting for multiple variables such as age, gender, household income, and occupation, people who wore glasses for a long time had a 15 percent lower risk of contracting COVID-19 compared to those who did not wear glasses. Those who said that wearing glasses interfered with wearing masks (and they would therefore spend less time wearing masks), wearing glasses protected them less, and wearing contact lenses did not have a protective effect.
This study shows that people who wear glasses have a significantly lower risk of contracting COVID-19, which highlights that the eyes are an important route of COVID-19 infection, so protecting the eyes may have an important role in limiting the spread of COVID-19.
These two studies remind us that many people focus on wearing masks and isolation, but neglect to wash their hands frequently, avoid touching their eyes with their hands, and protect their eyes.
Thesis Link:
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamaophthalmology/fullarticle/2770872
https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2022.03.29.22272997v1