Impact of COVID-19 pandemic on oral health procedures provided by the Brazilian public health system: COVID-19 and oral health in Brazil

The objective of this study was to assess the number of dental procedures performed in the Brazilian Public Health System (SUS) during the first wave of COVID-19 in Brazil (1 semester of 2020) and compare it with the same period of 2019. A retrospective study was conducted based on the SUS Dataset (DATASUS). Descriptive analysis of the number of dental procedures and socio-demographic regions was presented and the number of dental procedures during the first semester of 2020 was compared to 2019, using Wilcoxon Signed Rank Test (α = 0.05). The number of COVID-19 confirmed cases and deaths were also retrieved from DATASUS. Dental procedures decreased from 47 million in the first semester of 2019 to 15 million in 2020, representing an overall decrease of about 66%. Statistically significant differences were observed for the numbers of procedures regarding preventive actions related to oral health (-84.53%;