中国的研究人员发现，戴眼镜的人似乎更低的捕获 COVID-19 的风险。
【原文】
This article is republished here with permission from The Conversation. This content is shared here because the topic may interest Snopes readers; it does not, however, represent the work of Snopes fact-checkers or editors.
Researchers in China have found that people who wear glasses appear to be at lower risk of catching COVID-19. The authors of the study, published in JAMA Ophthalmology, noticed that since the coronavirus outbreak in Wuhan in December 2019, few patients with spectacles were admitted to hospital suffering from COVID-19. To investigate further, they collected data on the wearing of glasses from all patients with COVID-19 as part of their medical history.
Their small study found that only 16 (5.8%) of the 276 patients admitted with COVID-19 wore glasses for more than eight hours a day. As they determined that all these patients were short-sighted, they next looked up the proportion of people with myopia (short-sightedness) in Hubei Province, where the hospital is located. They found this to be much larger (31.5%), indicating that the proportion of short-sighted COVID-19 hospital admissions was over five times lower than might be expected from that population.
Ideally, this would follow two carefully matched groups of people – some wearing glasses and some not wearing glasses – to see which group gets infected more often. Evidence from such a controlled trial will always be far stronger than evidence from an observational study such as that in the recent paper.
We must also note that the authors of this study listed a number of weaknesses. It was a very small study at a single site. The researchers’ data for the general population came from a much earlier study on a sample that was not exactly matched (in terms of age, demography and other factors) to their sample admitted to hospital with COVID-19. And they couldn’t guarantee that all the people with short-sightedness in the general population also wore glasses for more than eight hours a day.
So although this new study is very interesting, there are plenty of reasons to be cautious about this result. We certainly need more data before any advice can be given about wearing goggles alongside our face masks.
Simon Kolstoe, Senior Lecturer in Evidence Based Healthcare and University Ethics Advisor, University of Portsmouth
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.