An Economic Data Point Worth Smiling About

(Bloomberg Opinion) -- Back in March and April, dental practices in the U.S. were among the businesses hardest hit by Covid-19 lockdowns, with employment falling 56.2%. As of mid-July, according to Friday’s employment report, their job losses since February had narrowed to 7.3%.

Even that much-smaller decline is pretty huge by dentists’ standards. As is apparent from the above chart, they were barely affected at all (peak job loss: 0.9%) by the last recession. Still, the roaring comeback — much bigger than that seen so far in the similarly hard-hit leisure and hospitality sector — offers some possible lessons for the rest of the economy, and some warnings too.

Dentistry does have the advantage that, although one can put it off for a while, it is an essential service in a way that, say, indoor restaurant dining is not. On the other hand, it is perhaps the highest-risk activity imaginable amid a pandemic caused by a virus that spreads mainly via little bits of saliva.

That risk is inherently greater for the practitioners than the patients, and the American Dental Association has come up with a quite-detailed set of guidelines and recommendations for how to minimize it. During a family visit a couple of weeks ago, the dentist and hygienist were well-outfitted with protective equipment and the latter dispensed with the standard ultrasonic cleaning — which can aerosolize saliva and allow it to hang in the air — in favor of an old-fashioned pick. No other patients were in the waiting room while my wife, son and I were there, masks were required except in the dentists’ chair and we had to submit to a temperature check before entering. Some dental practices are testing their patients for Covid-19 as well.

Whether all this will be adequate to prevent the spread of the disease via dentists’ offices is still an open question — amid the bounty of survey data available from the ADA and the Health Policy Institute, there isn’t anything about how many dentists have contracted Covid. But the economics of dentistry clearly allow for a much more careful and deliberate approach to managing the risks posed by the coronavirus than the economics of, say, bars. What’s not so clear is whether the dentists will be able to keep paying their bills if things have to go on like this for too much longer.

Nationwide, 60.7% of dental practices reported that patient volumes had returned to 76% or more of normal as of the week of July 27, and there’s big variation by region and state:

Meanwhile, only 48.7% of practices report that total collections (revenue) are back to 76% or more of normal. One telling statistic is that while 91.7% of practices reported paying staff in full the week of July 27, only 75.1% of non-owner dentists reported being paid in full. Another worrying one is that 45% report significant difficulty in getting enough N95 or KN95 masks (that, is masks that can block most virus particles).

So yes, the dentists are back, mostly. But as long as Covid-19 remains a big threat, they’re not going to be very comfortable.

This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.

Justin Fox is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering business. He was the editorial director of Harvard Business Review and wrote for Time, Fortune and American Banker. He is the author of “The Myth of the Rational Market.”

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