What we know about COVID-19 and sex for now – FG

The Federal Government has said that there are no scientific prove that the novel COVID-19 virus infection is sexually transmissible.

The National Coordinator of the Presidential Task Force (PTF) on COVID-19, Dr. Sani Aliyu, said this on Wednesday in Abuja at the 17th joint national briefing of the PTF on COVID-19.

He was reacting to a question bordering on alleged prove that the virus, after treatment by victims of the disease, still remains in male testicles.

According to him, although the world was still in the early days of the disease, no research had proven that it could be transmitted through sex, citing a test carried out on some women who had tested positive to COVID-19, but whose genital secretions tested negative afterwards for COVID-19.

He said: “At the moment, there is no evidence of sexual transmission when it comes to COVID-19, but of course, we are still in the early days of the disease. The same thing happened in the case of Ebola, when subsequently it was proven that it was sexually transmissible.

“There was a small test case series of 10 women, who had severe COVID-19 and genital secretions were negative of COVID-19 virus. I think it is still in the early days, I will just say, watch this space.”

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On the issue of increasing testing rates for the virus across the country, Aliyu said that though the PTF was experiencing some difficulties in the area of operational efficiency and testing sites, the task force was already working on solving that through more collaboration with appropriate partners.

“We are looking at every possibility of expanding testing but there are a lot of bottlenecks.

“Some of the bottlenecks are less to do with the laboratories, but more to do with the operations efficiency and also the availability of easy sampling sites.

“For example, in Lagos they have a lot of places where people can go to get tested and we are looking at that model.

“We already have the Chief Executive Officer of the National Primary Health Care Development Agency, Dr Faisal Shuaib, is part of the task force now, we are working with him closely to see how we can expand testing. All options are on the table”, he said.