Dentists were among the businesses that were severely affected by the COVID shutdown over the past several months.
Seehafer News asked Dr. Chris Hansen of Two Rivers Family Dental how their business volume was affected.
“When the governor signed the safer at home order in March of 2020, we were obligated to close our offices for about two and a half months,” he explained. “After the closure, we re-opened again in mid to late May, we had reduced the volume of our patients that we saw and we instituted some protocols so, it did affect the business of our office, but over time as we adapted and understood what we needed to do to keep our patients safe and also keep our staff safe, we were able to do workarounds.”
Hansen said that their business volume has pretty much returned to normal now, but the effects on patients won’t go away any time soon:
“I think we found that there was a lot of patients who had deferred treatment for good reason and that there were some dental needs that were left un-taken-care-of for many months,” he said. “Unfortunately dental disease is not something that tends to go away on itself and what tends to happen is that the dental disease and the situations get worse.”
Hansen said the result of the missed dental care was that small cavities became big cavities, gum disease worsened, there were infections, and teeth broke.
