According to a new study carried out by Chinese researchers, wearing glasses can shield people from contracting novel coronavirus infection.
The study, published in JAMA Ophthalmology, suggested that daily wear of glasses is associated with less susceptibility to coronavirus infection.
The researchers observed that the proportion of myopia in their subjects was much higher than the proportion of coronavirus patients who had myopia.
For the study, researchers examined 276 coronavirus-positive patients in Hubei. The study examined how many of them wore glasses for more than eight hours a day. The count was 16 (less than 6 per cent of the patients) and all of them had myopia.
The study authors then compared this with the proportion of people with myopia in Hubei province, which was 31.5 per cent based on an earlier study.
Limitations
However, the authors of the study also mentioned the limitations of their study. They stated that it was a single-centre study with small sample size. Also, the proportion in the population of people who wear glasses was based on previous data, not calculated from current local populations.
They also noted that the myopia rate obtained in previous studies included a small number of people with myopia who did not wear glasses.