Health experts recommend that contact-wearers should switch to glasses during the coronavirus pandemic.
That’s mainly due to the fact that people who wear contacts touch their eyes and faces more often than people who don’t wear contacts, according to the American Academy of Ophthalmology. Touching your face is a major way that COVID-19 has been spreading.
Contact lens users also have to touch their eyes daily, including removing their lenses twice or more every day. “You touch your eye and then you touch another part of your body,” Dr. Thomas Steinemann, a clinical spokesperson for the AAO, told CNN.
“You rub your eyes, then rub your face, scratch your face, put your fingers in your mouth, put your fingers in your nose,” he continued. “Some people are not very hygienic and may have forgotten to first wash their hands.”
Glasses may protect the wearer from COVID-19 virus particles that are in the air, he added, although there’s a higher chance you’ll catch it through your mouth or nose. While it’s “theoretically” possible you could get it through your eye, there’s “no proof of that,” Steinemann said.
What is more probable is that coronavirus can cause conjunctivitis, or pink eye. Symptoms include “tearing, itching or burning, blurred vision, red or ‘pink’ in the whites of the eye, pus, mucus and a yellow discharge that can crusts over the eyelashes, often sticking the eyes together after sleep,” CNN writes.
Reports from around the world show that around 1 to 3 percent of people who have coronavirus also have pink eye. This is worrisome because you can spread coronavirus by coming into contact with fluid from an infected person’s eyes or anything that person touches when carrying the fluid.
There could also be other reasons your eyes are red or pink, including the common cold, seasonal allergies, or a sty. The latter two aren’t contagious.
