With the health care community heavily focused on COVID-19 since the first quarter of 2020, there have been concerns that reporting of other diseases — and the resulting data that enables them to be more effectively treated and controlled — may have been impacted. For example, little is known about how the pandemic may have affected the reporting of sexually transmitted infections (STIs).
To address that issue, researchers at Johns Hopkins Medicine recently analyzed the number of reported cases of STIs within the United States during the first 40 weeks of 2020 and compared the counts with those recorded for the same period in 2019. And because the COVID-19 outbreak was first declared a U.S. national emergency on March 13, 2020 — near the end of week 11 — the researchers used that as the starting point for comparing reported STI cases in 2020 with the number of COVID-19 cases documented in weeks 12 through 40 of 2020.
Their findings were reported online Nov. 1, 2020, in the journal Sexually Transmitted Infections.
Read more at Johns Hopkins Medicine
