{"id":2602,"date":"2020-05-13T09:48:10","date_gmt":"2020-05-12T23:48:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blog.amt.org.au\/?p=2602"},"modified":"2020-05-13T09:48:16","modified_gmt":"2020-05-12T23:48:16","slug":"assessing-your-risks-in-a-covid-world","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.amt.org.au\/index.php\/2020\/05\/13\/assessing-your-risks-in-a-covid-world\/","title":{"rendered":"Assessing Your Risks in a COVID World"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
By Rebecca Barnett<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Picture this:<\/p>\n\n\n\n
You\u2019re a kid with an overbite attending your routine check up with the orthodontist.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Your orthodontist is a tiny bit eccentric and a lot manic. He alternates between patients in 2 separate clinic rooms. You\u2019re lying back in the dental chair in one clinic room waiting and listening to the orthodontist wrap up an appointment with another kid who has a class 1 malocclusion. You might even be hoping that the orthodontist doesn\u2019t tighten the wire on your braces too hard this time so you can\u2019t eat anything hard for a week. Like sultanas.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The orthodontist comes bolting into your clinic room, fresh from treating the other kid. He\u2019s not wearing gloves. He hasn\u2019t washed his hands. He asks you to open wide and then starts poking around in your gob with his unwashed, ungloved hands. You lie back praying that the kid he\u2019s just finished treating doesn\u2019t have a bad cold. Or anything really.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
It\u2019s not that you\u2019re an infection control expert. You\u2019re only, like, 14. But it does seem pretty freaky that another kid\u2019s saliva is probably still on those fingers that are now in your gob and you\u2019re not sure how many other kid\u2019s gobs the fingers have prodded around in without being washed in between. And you may not know how to spell autoclave but it seems pretty pointless to heat all those instruments to bug-killing high temperatures and then throw caution to the wind with your hand hygiene. And seriously \u2013 how gross must it be to get slobbered on by pubescent strangers?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The whole scenario is obviously completely implausible.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
And yet, that memory is etched into my brain indelibly. The scene is the dental unit at Royal North Shore Hospital in the early 1980s. It was host to a public orthodontic clinic once a month. My Dad ran the dental unit so I benefited from publicly funded braces during an era of extraordinarily laissez-faire, optional infection control. Washing hands between patients was obviously preferable and some dentists even routinely wore gloves but, man, things were remarkably loose. Eyebrows were no doubt raised by some of these slack practices but, if they were taking place in a hospital dental clinic, imagine how wild west things would have been in some private dental clinics around that time! Poor old Semmelweis<\/a> would have been rolling in his grave.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blog.amt.org.au\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/10\/Beck-selfie-copy-e1565088065332.jpg?resize=190%2C190&ssl=1\")
<\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n