﻿Hi, everyone and welcome back to Inside Infection Control, our video series here at CDC's Project Firstline.
I'm Abby Carlson. It's great to have you here today.
Today we are going to talk about COVID-19 and the eyes.
You've probably seen that eye protection, either goggles or a face shield,
is part of the PPE recommended for COVID-19.
But why is that? What do the eyes have to do with anything about this?
We focus most of the time on protecting our nose and mouth
because we think about the virus getting into those target zones of the nose,
the mouth, the back of the throat, and lungs, and then infecting us.
But eye protection is needed because the eyes are another way
that COVID-19 can get into those places and make you sick.
With eye protection, the first thing you might consider is, oh,
we're thinking about splashes and sprays of blood or body fluids that might land in the eye.
And that's true. That's definitely a consideration.
But for COVID-19, we also want to protect our eyes from respiratory droplets
because we know those droplets can carry virus
and they can get into our bodies through our eyes and infect us.
So again, they can reach those target zones in the nose, mouth, and back of the throat, through the eyes.
How does that happen? What's the connection?
Okay, so imagine somebody is coughing at you or even talking at you
and some of these little droplets are coming out,
and they're aimed towards the eye. But where do they go?
Your eye, in its anatomy, has a thin, delicate tissue called the conjunctiva,
that covers the inside of your eyelids and part of your eyeball itself,
and that is a mucus membrane, so it's like you have inside of your nose and your mouth,
and other areas of your body,
and its job is to keep the eyes nice and protected, and it needs to be hydrated to do that
and so it protects both the membrane and the eye itself.
That conjunctiva is covered by a liquid, okay?
That liquid is essentially your tears,
and that protects your eyes and keeps them healthy, and making sure they're working correctly.
But your tears aren't just salty water.
They're actually part of your body's natural defenses, your immune system.
They contain chemicals and antibodies that help protect your eye from things
that get into your eye like germs, like bacteria, funguses, even viruses.
Your tears do a really great job of protecting your eye most of the time,
but some things like COVID-19 can get into the eye and cause problems.
And that's why we need an extra layer of protection with a goggle or a face shield.
Okay, so that liquid--all this liquid is being produced to keep your eye nice and hydrated, nice and wet.
But where does it go? Because it's being made every single day.
Well, it travels through your tear ducts.
So your tear ducts sit right here at the corners of your eyes by the bridge of your nose,
and you can see them if you look in the mirror, you'll see a little pinpoint dot where they open up,
and they connect your eyes to the nose in the back of your throat.
There's actually a little drain that travels in there.
And, all that liquid that your eyes are making goes down that drain
and gets drained out through the back of the throat.
This happens every single day and is a normal process.
And you can think about it, when you think about yourself crying, right?
You know that your nose runs.
Well, some of that is because some of that water that you're producing when you get tears
is traveling down those tear ducts, down that drain into your nose.
And you have your nose, it comes out the front, it runs.
That's your tears draining out.
Alright, so the things that land in your eyes, like these respiratory droplets we're talking about
with virus in them--they can hit this eye system, they mix with the liquid in the eyes.
They travel down those drains and into the nose and the back of the throat.
When the virus gets those places-- the nose, the throat, the mouth,
it can find cells that it can hack into and cause infection, and that will make you sick.
Now, not only that, but it can also infect the eye directly.
So we're learning more and more about this.
But we found that there are cells within the eye that the virus can also hijack
and get into and cause infection.
They're certainly not the only virus that can do this.
One that's really familiar to everybody is pinkeye, where you get a nice red, inflamed eye.
It's itchy. It hurts.
That's caused by a virus, and it's the same thing--
it hijacks into a cell and causes infection.
COVID-19 doesn't cause those same symptoms. It doesn't make you feel the same way,
but it still could get in those cells, still can make you sick,
so we worry about that, too.
Alright, so it makes sense with all of that, that we would want to protect our eyes
on top of protecting our nose, our mouth and our throat,
when we think about it this way, when we think about respiratory droplets.
At the same time, while we're protecting our eyes--just a quick note--
you want to make sure that you can still see correctly.
So, however you choose to protect your eyes,
make sure that you're still able to do your work and see what's going on.
We'll talk more about other PPE in future episodes.
We're also going to have some additional pictures and tools for you
on our website in the comments section as we go along here.
So do feel free to follow up with us either on Facebook, Twitter,
or on our website, CDC.gov/ProjectFirstline
and we will see you back here for the next episode.