Timing of oral and maxillofacial surgery in infected COVID-19 subjects: A retrospective cohort study

This study aims to investigate the association of time to oral and maxillofacial surgery after Covid-19 infection with the risk of postoperative complications in a population from China.

In the current study, a total of 1342 consecutive patients underwent general anesthesia (GA) in the maxillofacial district of the Chinese Oral and Maxillofacial COVID Collaborative, which consists of 27 teaching hospitals. Pulmonary, cardiovascular and thrombotic complications were monitored for 1 month after GA surgery (GAS) and their incidence was reported for the first 30 days.

Post-operative complications were observed in 4 of 1076 cases (0.37%) who had suffered from mild Omicron infection and in none of the controls. Results from the Quasi-Poisson multivariate regression models showed that Omicron infection was not associated with increased post-operative complications compared to controls. Among the infected patients, delays of >4 but not >6 weeks were associated with lower OR of complications (0.08, 95% CI 0.01–0.78 and 0.06, 95% CI 0.01–1.80, respectively).

Findings of this study suggest that delaying surgery for a period of 4–6 weeks following infection can provide a protective effect.