Introduction:

Dental care, by its proper nature, implies a higher risk of SARS-CoV-2 transmission. It is therefore essential that the dental center staff carry to extremes biosecurity measures during and after the health crisis.

Objective:

To evaluate compliance with biosecurity measures against COVID-19 during dental care in a region of Peru.

Materials and methods:

Cross-sectional study carried out in the region of Ica, in Peru. 304 dentists from public and private practice participated. Socio-occupational and health characteristics were collected. Compliance with biosecurity measures was evaluated with the Biosecurity Scale for COVID-19, designed and validated by the researchers. A descriptive analysis was performed and differences were evaluated with the chi-square test.

Results:

72.7% of the participants fail to comply with the biosecurity measures. Higher proportions of non-compliance were found among the dentists from 41 to 50 years old (76%), without a second specialization (76.4%), and in those who received the first (100%) and the second (90.4%) doses of the vaccine against COVID-19. Likewise, among dentists who work in the private sector and do not have second specialty (75.3%); among those who received the first dose (100%) and the second dose (92.2%) of the vaccine against COVID-19 respectively; in those who had COVID-19 twice (100%) and more than twice (100%), and in those dentist who did not have relatives deceased by coronavirus. All these differences reached statistical significance (p < 0, 05).

Conclusions:

Biosafety measures are breached during dental care. There are several factors like age between 41 and 50 years, not having a second specialty among others that could increase the probability of failing to comply with these measures.

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