What is coronavirus or COVID-19?
How can coronavirus affect your eyes?
Eye care during the COVID-19 outbreak
- Wear glasses at home and outside.
- Always keep your glasses clean.
- Don’t rub your eyes.
- Have critical eye care medications and supplies at home all the time.
- Contact your ophthalmologist for all upcoming appointments.
- Call the eye specialists’ office ahead of time if you have a cough or fever. If the appointment is not an emergency, you may need to stay home.
- If you need to cough or sneeze during your exam, move away from the microscope.
- If you arrive at the doctor’s office sick, it is best to wear a protective covering or mask and stay away from fellow patients at all times.
- Practice safe hygiene and social distancing:
- Wash your hands often with soap and water or alcohol-based hand sanitizer.
- Avoid touching your face, especially – nose, eyes, and mouth.
- If you cough or sneeze, cover your face with the inside of your arm or a tissue.
- Avoid close contact with sick people.
- Try to stay at home when you are sick.
- Disinfect commonly touched surfaces like doorknobs and countertops to stop spreading the disease.
How to protect your eyes and health?
- If you wear contact lenses, switch to glasses for some time: Spectacles or glasses give you better protection from coronavirus than a regular contact lens. It is because contact lens wearers touch their eyes or face more often than spectacles wearer.
- Wearing glasses add extra protection: Corrective sunglasses and eyeglasses protect your eye by shielding them from the infected respiratory droplets. But remember one thing, they are not 100% safe and there is still a chance to get infected.
- Make an eye-approved grocery list: Buy the following food items to keep your eyes and body healthy.
- Foods with omega-3: Fish such as salmon, mackerel, herring and tuna, flax seeds, and flaxseed oil.
- Foods with antioxidants: Dark chocolate, blueberries, and artichokes.
- Foods with vitamin E: Spinach, whole-grain cereal products, hazelnuts, and almonds.
- Allow your eyes to rest: Don’t strain much on your eyes. We understand that when you stay at home your eyes don’t get natural light as much as when you go outside. Also, staying at home means more usage of social media and watching videos, so always try to give rest to your eyes.
- Follow the 20-20-20 rule: For every 20 minutes of screen time you must look away from the screen and focus on any object that is situated 20 feet away from you for a minimum of 20 seconds.
- Use blue-light-blocking spectacles: Try your best to use computer glasses or blue-light blocking glasses whenever you are using a laptop or a PC for work. You will be glad to know that using blocking-blue glasses at nighttime can help you improve and regulate the normal sleep cycles, as the brain will confuse screen light as the natural sunlight.
Use common sense to stay healthy
- Wash your hands frequently after touching any surface.
- Don’t panic
- Have face masks at your home
- Don’t travel unnecessarily
- Avoid crowded place
- Don’t listen to and spread rumors
- Always follow good hygiene rules for contact lens and spectacles wearing.
- Avoid rubbing and touching your eyes, nose, and mouth.
