If you have been eagerly anticipating your next root canal, well you can start thinking about getting it done soon as dental offices start to reopen.

Speaking on The Jeff Andreas Show, the President of the Kamloops and District Dental Society says some offices began opening this week and even more will do so next week.

For those in the dentist’s chair, David Ciriani says it won’t look to much different than before COVID-19. “The biggest change that people would notice is just face shields. Besides that, the thing that everyone loves to hate, rubber dams, are well proved to reduce the number of pathogens on the aerosols produced. So, I think people will see more rubber dams used.”

Ciriani says another big change will be contacting patients before they come in to assess their risk level for COVID, and once they come into the office they will then have to reinforce the fact that they’re healthy.

“A lot of what we do, we did already. You know we’ve had to deal with H1N1 and SARS, all those things. So, that sort of protection is really built into the dental office. One of the things that patients might notice is some are wearing face masks, or face shields more than before.”

“Part of the guidelines to, like everywhere, we have to limit the number of people we see. So we cant have the same traffic through the office as we were accustomed to before, so that’s going to slow things down.”

He says one of the more difficult things to acquire is plexiglass shields for the front desk.