You are here

Article Text

Article menu
Download PDFPDF
Research Letter
Research letter
Reporting of sexually transmitted infections during the COVID-19 pandemic
  1. Matthew A Crane1,
  2. Aleksandra Popovic1,
  3. Andrew I Stolbach2,
  4. Khalil G Ghanem3
  1. 1 Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, Baltimore, Maryland, USA
  2. 2 Department of Emergency Medicine, Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, Baltimore, Maryland, USA
  3. 3 Division of Infectious Diseases, Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, Baltimore, Maryland, USA
  1. Correspondence to Matthew A Crane, Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, Baltimore, MD 21205-2196, USA; mcrane9{at}jhmi.edu

https://doi.org/10.1136/sextrans-2020-054805

Statistics from Altmetric.com

    Request Permissions

    If you wish to reuse any or all of this article please use the link below which will take you to the Copyright Clearance Center’s RightsLink service. You will be able to get a quick price and instant permission to reuse the content in many different ways.

    Social distancing guidelines and resource reallocation during the COVID-19 pandemic have led to significant disruption of sexual health clinics within the USA.1 Little is known about how this disruption has impacted STI reporting. To understand this, we analysed the number of reported cases of STIs within the USA during the COVID-19 pandemic.

    The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reports cases of selected infectious diseases as provisional data made available throughout the year by MMWR week, an approximation of calendar week used for reporting.2 For the first 40 weeks of 2019 and 2020, we compiled weekly counts and year-to-date counts of provisional cases of chlamydia, gonorrhoea and primary and secondary (P&S) syphilis. Reporting was also examined relative to national cases of COVID-19 (see figure 1).3

    Figure 1

    Reporting of chlamydia, gonorrhoea and syphilis during the COVID-19 pandemic. aMoving 3-week average of provisional case counts of chlamydia, gonorrhoea and syphilis as reported by the …

    View Full Text

    Footnotes

    • Handling editor Anna Maria Geretti

    • Contributors All authors participated in study design. MAC and AP participated in data collection and analysis. All authors contributed equally in writing this manuscript. All authors read and approved the final manuscript.

    • Funding The authors have not declared a specific grant for this research from any funding agency in the public, commercial or not-for-profit sectors.

    • Competing interests None declared.

    • Patient consent for publication Not required.

    • Ethics approval This study was determined to not constitute human subjects research by the Johns Hopkins Medicine Institutional Review Board (#IRB00257823).

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