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Study finds people who wear glasses are less likely to get to Covid-19


Mangalore Today News Network / News18

New Delhi, Feb 22, 2021:     According to a study, people who wear glasses are less likely to be infected by coronavirus because they rub their eyes less. Indian researchers published the non-peer-reviewed study on the website medRxiv in which they studied 304 people -- 223 male and 81 female --aged between 10 to 80 at a hospital in northern India over two weeks last summer and all the subjects had reported Covid symptoms.

 

Glass


It was found that of those, only 19 percent said they wore glasses most of the time. The researchers found that on average, participants touched their faceup to 23 times in an hour and their eyes an average of three times per hour. According to Independent, the study suggests that the risk of contracting Covid was two to three times less among people who wear glasses than the people who don’t.

It states that one of the most significant ways of catching the virus is touching and rubbing the eyes, nose or mouth with contaminated hands. Long-term use of spectacles prevents touching of eyes, hence, the fewer chances of contracting Covid-19. Findings suggest that those who wear spectacles for eight hours are less likely to catch the virus.

Earlier, doctors had advised people who wear contact lenses to switch to glasses to avoid passing coronavirus to their eyes.

As per Daily Mail, last year researchers from China found Covid patients were five times less likely to have frames than the general population. The team of researchers from The Second Affiliated Hospital of Nanchang University stated that they believe that the receptors on which the virus latches onto to enter and infect human cells, ACE-2 receptors, is found in the eyes.

The authors discovered that people who wear glasses are less susceptible to Covid 19. The study noted that the eyes are considered an important channel of SARS-CoV-2 to enter the human body and the eyeglasses act as a protective eye gear, hence, reducing the risk of virus transferring to the eyes.