Can you get Covid-19 through your eyes? Possibly. Should we all be wearing – Health News Today

By health&beauty Last updated Sep 30, 2020

But what about the eyes? Should we all be wearing goggles or face shields as well?

It’s certainly possible that a person could get Covid-19 through the eyes, said Dr. Thomas Steinemann, a clinical spokesperson for the American Academy of Ophthalmology.

There is “emerging evidence” that people are catching the virus from droplets floating in the air, the World Health Organization confirmed earlier this month. One of the ways those droplets can enter your body is through the eyes. It’s also possible to get infected by touching a contaminated surface and then touching the eye, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

“Yes, it’s in the air,” Steinemann told CNN. “Can it land on the eye? Of course.”

Contracting the virus through your eyes is probably less likely, however, than getting it through your nose or mouth or from inhaling it, Steinemann said.

Steinemann said that if a significant number of people were getting infected through their eyes, doctors would probably see more Covid-19 patients with conjunctivitis, also known as pink eye (though having pink eye doesn’t necessarily mean you have the virus).

Also consider the path the virus would have to take to infect you. It would have to infect the surface of your eye and be carried to your nose through your tears, he said. From the nose, it would travel to the mouth or throat, and from there to the airways and into the lungs.

“That’s a rather circuitous route,” Steinemann said. “But I want to emphasize that it’s certainly plausible.”

So do you need to wear goggles?

So do you need to add goggles or face shields to your coronavirus wardrobe?

There’s been heightened interest around that question since Dr. Anthony Fauci, the nation’s top infectious disease expert, was asked about it in a recent interview with ABC News.

Here’s what Fauci said: “If you really want perfect protection of your mucosal surfaces … you have mucosa in the nose, mucosa in the mouth, but you also have you mucosa in the eye. Theoretically, you should protect all the mucosal surfaces. So if you have goggles or an eye shield, you should use it. It’s not universally recommended. But if you really want to be complete, you should probably use it, if you can.”

Some people took that to mean that Fauci was urging everyone to wear eye coverings. Others complained that perhaps hazmat suits would be next.

But at a CNN coronavirus town hall on Thursday, Fauci suggested that his comments on eye coverings were overblown.

“I was talking to a group of teachers in a fireside chat and one of the teachers asked, ‘Can the virus enter through the eye?’” Fauci said. “Because some of the teachers were seeing people on television and wanted to wear eye shields.”

He continued, “And my response was, ‘Well certainly, if you have an eye shield and you’d like to wear it, it could help because the virus could enter through the eye.’ That’s not a recommendation that everybody should be wearing an eye shield.”

Steinemann said that eye coverings were…