The fallout of a new revelation in the sexual activity space is going to be far-reaching. It seems that sexually-transmitted diseases (STD) may be spreading exponentially as more people stay on lockdown across the US. It would seem, with not many options to choose from, everyone is turning to sex to occupy their time. However, there’s much more to it than that.
Across the US, health care workers have been forced to redirect their attention to containing the coronavirus and are not spending the same amount of time on other, habitual activities, such as tracing HIV and STDs. Contact tracers are those who typically keep tabs on the diseases, and, according to Business Insider (BI), they are admittedly unable to dedicate the necessary resources to the activity, with case loads being much lighter than before.
There’s also the fact that fewer people are able to get tested. Since everyone has been forced to stay at home, submitting to a test for an STD has become a luxury, not a necessity. As a result, there is a greater propensity for the diseases to spread, as more people are less aware that they could be transmitters.
David Hervey, who leads the National Coalition of STD Directors, explains, “Anecdotally, I don’t think people have stopped having sex necessarily, although the number of partners may have gone down. we’re really worried about the larger issues of people not getting tested, people not getting treated, and what that means for inadvertent spread of infections in the future.”
When contact tracers were able to target STDs, the numbers had already been increasing. Cases of drug-resistant strains of chlamydia and gonorrhea were up and, in 2018, 94 newborns died from syphilis, 22% more than a year earlier. With so much attention now being placed on combatting the coronavirus, and not on STDs, there’s a chance that these numbers are going to skyrocket, as both the Joint United Nations Programme on HIV and AIDS (UNAIDS) and the World Health Organization have predicted.
Both organizations have asserted that, because of the amount of resources being concentrated on COVID-19 and nowhere else, it is “possible that COVID-19 could rewind more than a decade of progress both diagnosing and treating HIV infections in Africa, ultimately leading to 500,000 extra deaths in 2020-2021, if people can’t get the necessary drugs, testing, and treatment to fight back against HIV,” according to BI.
There’s also the question of how the STDs could be spreading so rampantly. A number of scenarios lead to contagion, but most people are currently on lockdown, so physical contact outside of established home elements should be extremely limited. Therefore, if a partner were to suddenly find out that he or she was carrying an STD, the other half of that relationship will certainly wonder how it is possible. The coronavirus could be the cause of a rise in divorces and breakups, as well.
