A multi-centre study of corneal donations in Aravind Eye Hospital found that during the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, the number of donations had fallen drastically. This hurt patients who required corneal transplant to heal ulcers. Some of them have lost their sight permanently.
The study ‘Impact of COVID-19 pandemic on infectious Keratitis Outcomes: A Retrospective Multi-center Study in Tertiary Eye Hospitals of South India’, published in a peer-reviewed journal Cornea, found that the delay in presentation and acute shortage of donor corneal tissues for emergency keratoplasty because of the pandemic had resulted in irreversible blindness in a significant number of patients. The study that pertained to the five centres of Aravind Eye Hospital found that from 1,265 corneal donations in 2016-17, it fell to 61 in 2020-21.
Any injury to the eye could result in a whitish scar, leading to the cornea losing its transparency, and the person would require a corneal transplant.
In India, an estimated 6.8 million people have unilateral blindness due to corneal diseases and around a million (14.5%) are blind in both eyes. Every year around 25,000 to 30,000 more suffer corneal blindness, said Josephine S. Christy, director of Aravind Eye Bank Association of Pondicherry and senior consultant, cornea and refractive services, Aravind Eye Hospital, Puducherry, and lead author of the study.
The study was done during the first lockdown in 2020.
“For almost two years, we are running short of cornea donors. There is another group of people who may have blindness due to corneal scars. They have been waiting for two, three years. For the past 18 months, we have not done a single transplant,” she said.
“Since March 24, 2020, when we received notification from the Health and Family Welfare Ministry, we did not collect corneas and were drastically short. Even now, until we have a negative RT-PCR report, we are unable to harvest corneas as when deaths occur at home it is difficult to get negative results,” Dr. Christy explained.
“We took data from all five centres of patients, who had corneal ulcers and lost their sight for want of donors. We found that 20%-25% have permanently gone blind. These are people who came to the hospital for treatment, but there were many more who were not able to come due to travel restrictions,” she said. In previous years, less than 2% of people would became blind permanently.
