Pandemic week 4 update

April 11, 2020 - David Hall
Category: Client News

We are now four weeks after the initial recommendation of the American Dental Association to limit dental care to non-elective procedures, given in response to the coronavirus pandemic. And this past week there has been a slight further downturn in appointment requests. In weeks one through three, appointment requests were down from 64% to 67%. This past week (April 3-9) they were down 69.8% from last year’s average. Here is the graph showing the data:

While we haven’t received word from all of our clients, we have received from many of them, and we aren’t aware of any who are operating normally. Many are subject to government orders to only see emergency and urgent care patients. If any don’t have such orders in their states, they are still influenced by the recommendations of the American Dental Association. And we should add that these figures we are reporting are not of patients being seen, so they aren’t a direct result of governmental or association restrictions. Rather, they are the numbers of requests initiated by patients, so they are a measure of the response of the public to the news they are hearing about the COVID-19 pandemic.