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Letter
Compliance with COVID-19 rules on intimate physical contact between households
  1. Dee Menezes1,
  2. Pam Sonnenberg2,
  3. Malachi Willis3,
  4. Catherine H Mercer2,
  5. Kirstin Mitchell4,
  6. Nigel Field2
  1. 1 Institute of Health Informatics Research, University College London, London, UK
  2. 2 Institute for Global Health, University College London, London, UK
  3. 3 MRC/CSO Social and Public Health Sciences Unit, University of Glasgow, Glasgow, UK
  4. 4 University of Glasgow, Glasgow, UK
  1. Correspondence to Dee Menezes, Institute of Health Informatics Research, University College London, London, UK; d.menezes{at}ucl.ac.uk

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Despite concerns about COVID-19 ‘lockdown fatigue’ affecting compliance, most people adhered to the rules on intimate physical contact (ie, sex) between households. Four months after the first lockdown started, ~10% of survey participants in the Natsal-COVID wave 1 study reported sex outside the household in the 4 weeks prior to interview (quasi-representative web panel of 6654 British residents aged 18–59 years; July–August 2020).1 2 Those in steady relationships but not living with their partner (7.6% of sample) were most likely to report sex outside the household (56.8% …

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Footnotes

  • Handling editor Anna Maria Geretti

  • Twitter @sexresearchnow, @KMitchinGlasgow, @fienige

  • Contributors The paper was conceived by DM, PS, CHM, KM and NF. Statistical analysis was done by DM with input from MW. DM and NF wrote the first draft with further contributions from PS, CHM and KM. PS and CHM are principal investigators (PIs) on Natsal, while NF and KM are PIs on Natsal-COVID. NF is responsible for overall content as the guarantor.

  • Funding The Natsal Resource, which is supported by a grant from the Wellcome Trust (212931/Z/18/Z), with contributions from the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) and National Institute for Health Research (NIHR), supports the Natsal-COVID Study in addition to funding from the UCL Coronavirus Response Fund and the University of Glasgow MRC/CSO Social and Public Health Sciences Unit (core funding, MC_UU_00022/3; MC_UU_00022/2; SPHSU17; SPHSU18).

  • Competing interests NF served as an associate editor for BMJ STIs until May 2023. No other competing interests reported.

  • Provenance and peer review Not commissioned; internally peer reviewed.