The Impact of the COVID‐19 Pandemic on Pattern of Antibiotic and Opioid Prescriptions by Dentists in Alberta, Canada
Bibliographic record
Abstract
OBJECTIVES: After the shutdown of most dental services during the COVID-19 lockdown, the oral health community was concerned about an increase in prescribing opioids and antibiotics by dentists due to patients' limited access to dental offices. Therefore, the objective of this study was to investigate the impact of COVID-19 pandemic on the pattern of antibiotic and opioid prescriptions by dentists in Alberta, Canada. METHODS: Data obtained from the Tracked Prescription Program were divided into antibiotics and opioids. Time periods were outlined as pre-, during-, and postlockdown (phase 1 and 2). For the number of prescriptions and average supply, each monthly average was compared to the corresponding prelockdown monthly average, using descriptive analysis. Time series analyses were conducted using regression analyses with an autoregressive error model. Data were trained and tested on monthly observations before lockdown and predicted for during- and postlockdown. RESULTS: A total of 1.1 million antibiotics and 400,000 opioids dispense were tracked. Decreases in the number of prescriptions during lockdown presented for antibiotics (n = 24,933 vs. 18,884) and opioids (n = 8892 vs. 6051). Average supplies (days) for the antibiotics (n = 7.10 vs. 7.55) and opioids (n = 3.92 vs. 4.05) were higher during the lockdown period. In the trend analyses, the monthly number of antibiotic and opioid prescriptions showed the same pattern and decreased during lockdown. CONCLUSION: The COVID-19 pandemic altered the trends of prescribing antibiotics and opioids by dentists. The full impact of COVID-19 pandemic on the population's oral health in light of changes in prescribing practices by dentists during and after lockdown warrants further investigation.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".