Effectiveness of the Covid-19 vaccines in preventing infection in dental practitioners – results of a cross-sectional ‘questionnaire-based’ survey

  1. Sanjeev Kumar
  2. Susmita Saxena
  3. Mansi Atri
  4. Sunil Kumar Chamola

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Abstract

India started its vaccination program at the beginning of 2021, the main beneficiaries being health workers and frontline workers including police, paramilitary forces, sanitation workers, and disaster management volunteers in the first phase. By the time, the second wave of Covid-19 impacted India, approximately 14 million healthcare and frontline workers, including dentists had been vaccinated.

Aim

To study the effectiveness of vaccination on a subset of high-risk healthcare workers i.e. dentists in preventing Covid-19 during the second wave of the pandemic.

Study design

A questionnaire based pan-India online survey was carried out to record the Covid-related experiences of dentists prior to and after vaccination.

Result

The sample size for this survey was 4493 respondents from across India. During the second wave, 9.18% (n=364) respondents became positive in spite of the vaccine, while 14.69%(n=78) became positive in the unvaccinated group. A chi-square test of independence was performed to examine the relation between vaccination and the Covid positivity rate in all age groups. The relation between these variables was highly significant, [ X2 (1, N = 4493) = 15 . 9809, p= . 000064 ].

Conclusion

Our pan-India online survey inferred that vaccination has a definitive role to play in reducing the positivity rate amongst dentists during the second wave of the pandemic across all age groups.

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    SciScore for 10.1101/2021.05.28.21257967: (What is this?)

    Please note, not all rigor criteria are appropriate for all manuscripts.

    Table 1: Rigor

    Ethicsnot detected.
    Sex as a biological variablenot detected.
    Randomizationnot detected.
    Blindingnot detected.
    Power Analysisnot detected.

    Table 2: Resources

    Software and Algorithms
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  2. Version published to 10.1101/2021.05.28.21257967v2 on medRxiv
  3. Version published to 10.1101/2021.05.28.21257967v1 on medRxiv