Skip to main content

Sex in the time of Covid-19

When we are all trying to avoid deadly spread of coronavirus infections, can we still have sex?

This is a GREAT question. Luckily the New York City department of health has answered this and many more questions you may hesitate to ask in their very complete and unabashed 2 page primer on the subject. Please follow the link. It is a brilliant document leaving just enough to the imagination.

The most controversial and absolutely true statement they make is that "You are your safest sex partner." 

Sex is the most physically intimate activity that most people engage in. Coronavirus is transmitted when virus from one person's respiratory tract (usually lungs, mouth or nose) finds its way to another person's respiratory tract where it infects vulnerable cells. Not all cells are vulnerable. Coronavirus is found in certain other body fluids but it is less practical for the viruses in, say, stool or tears to be involved in transmitting infection. But sex between humans just about always involves two people creating respiratory aerosols. We can assume that having sex is extremely good at transferring coronavirus from one person to another, and that there is virtually no practical way to have safe sex with a person who is shedding the virus. Most likely it's just the kissing and heavy breathing that is the dangerous part rather than the part that involves genitals.

So when there is an outbreak like this it is a terrible idea to be physically intimate with anyone new. 

It's important to evaluate your risk of infecting others or being infected by others according to how many contacts you have and how intense those contacts are. The clerk at the grocery store has had some contact with hundreds of potentially infected people every day and when you contact that clerk, you are, in effect, in second hand contact with all of those people. But since you barely breathe the same air as the clerk, the risk is tolerable. If that clerk was also a daycare worker who was in close and messy contact with many potentially infected children, the risk to you is higher. If the clerk also coughs right in your face or he is your husband, you have many high risk intimate second hand contacts.

Sex is like that. If you were unwise enough to go out on a Tinder date with some guy who you only know from his curated content, he might in fact be an international cage fighter. If the date got hot and heavy, you would have intimate second hand contact with all of those other international cage fighters (or pro basketball players or whatever) because your new beau had deeply inhaled all of their very high risk respiratory aerosols. This guy might not feel sick at all, or maybe just a tad under the weather, and still be shedding virus like crazy. In fact, with all of those high risk contacts, he would be more than likely to be infected. 

The safest of all contacts at this time is none at all. This is impractical for most people. Second is to limit contacts to only a household and make sure that household limits their contacts to you. Once you start hanging out with people with many high risk intimate contacts, your risk of contracting the virus goes way up and then you are sick and are the person infecting others. So think about it. If you are hooked on online dating, keep it online. Think of it as a long courtship. By the time you meet this guy in person after weeks or more of quarantine you'll be pretty sure he's not a jerk.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

How to make your own ultrasound gel (which is also sterile and edible and environmentally friendly) **UPDATED--NEW RECIPE**

I have been doing lots of bedside ultrasound lately and realized how useful it would be in areas far off the beaten track like Haiti, for instance. With a bedside ultrasound (mine fits in my pocket) I could diagnose heart disease, kidney and gallbladder problems, various cancers as well as lung and intestinal diseases. Then I realized that I would have to take a whole bunch of ultrasound gel with me which would mean that I would have to check luggage, which is a real pain when traveling light to a place where luggage disappears. I heard that you can use water, or spit, in a pinch, or even lotion, though oil based coupling media apparently break down the surface of the transducer. Or, of course, you can just use ultrasound gel. Ultrasound requires an aqueous interface between the transducer and the skin or else all you see is black. Ultrasound gel is a clear goo, looks like hair gel or aloe vera, and is made by several companies out of various combinations of propylene glycol, glyce

Ivermectin for Covid--Does it work? We don't know.

  Lately there has been quite a heated controversy about whether to use ivermectin for Covid-19.  The FDA , a US federal agency responsible for providing unbiased information to protect people from harmful drugs, foods, even tobacco products, has said that there is not good evidence of ivermectin's safety and effectiveness in treating Covid 19, and that just about sums up what we truly know about ivermectin in the context of Covid. The CDC, Centers for Disease Control, a branch of the department of Health and Human Services, tasked with preventing and treating disease and injury, also recently warned  people not to use ivermectin to treat Covid outside of actual clinical trials. Certain highly qualified physicians, including ones who practice critical care medicine and manage many patients with severe Covid infections in the intensive care unit vocally support the use of ivermectin to treat Covid and have published dosing schedules and reviews of the literature supporting it for tr

Old Fangak, South Sudan--Bedside Ultrasound and other stuff

I just got back from a couple of weeks in Old Fangak, a community of people living by the Zaraf River in South Sudan. It's normally a small community, with an open market and people who live by raising cows, trading on the river, fishing and gardening. Now there are tens of thousands of people there, still displaced from their homes by the civil war which has gone on intermittently for decades. There are even more people now than there were last year. There is a hospital in Old Fangak, which is run by Jill Seaman, one of the founders of Sudan Medical relief and a fierce advocate for treatment of various horrible and neglected tropical diseases, along with some very skilled and committed local clinical officers and nurses and a contingent of doctors, nurses and support staff from Medecins Sans Frontieres (Doctors Without Borders, also known as MSF) who have been helping out for a little over a year. The hospital attempts to do a lot with a little, and treats all who present ther