A research conducted by Chinese researchers, who tested the presence of the Wuhan coronavirus in the semen of COVID-19 affected patients found that a minuscule number of them had the new coronavirus in their semen, raising likelihood, although a slim one, of sexual transmission of the virus.
Doctors at China’s Shangqiu municipal hospital detected that out of 38 men hospitalised with the disease, six of them(16%), had tested positive for Sars-CoV-2 in their semen.
The researchers who carried out the research, however, claimed that the findings were preliminary and was based on only a small number of infected men. They added that more research needs to be conducted on the subject to ascertain if sexual transmission might be one of the ways in which the pandemic is spreading.
“More research is needed with respect to the detailed information about virus shedding, survival time and concentration in semen,” the team wrote in a study published on Thursday in JAMA Network Open.
“If it could be proved that SARS-CoV-2 can be transmitted sexually … (that) might be a critical part of the prevention,” the researchers said while adding, “especially considering the fact that SARS-CoV-2 was detected in the semen of recovering patients.”
The report is in stark contrast to the study conducted on 34 Chinese men suffering from COVID-19 that was published in the journal Fertility and Sterility last month. The Chinese researchers found no evidence of coronavirus present in semen tested between eight days and almost three months after diagnosis.
According to Allan Pacey, a professor of andrology at Britain’s Sheffield University, the latest study about the presence of coronavirus in semen should be viewed with caution citing technical difficulties faced by the researchers in testing semen for viruses. He stated that the presence of SARS-CoV-2 in sperm is not an indicator of whether it is active and capable of transmitting infection.
Another academician, Sheena Lewis, a professor of reproductive medicine at Queen’s University Belfast, emphasised on the fact that the study was “very small” and its findings were consistent with other small studies that showed low or no SARS-CoV-2 in tests of semen samples.
Although it may sound obvious that a highly contagious virus like Novel Coronavirus will transit through sex also, actually different contagions spread through different routes. Coronavirus mainly attacks the respiratory system, and that’s why it is mostly found in the respiratory tract, and it spreads when the virus comes out of the body while coughing, sneezing, or in saliva. As the reproductive system in humans is a separate system, not every virus that is present in the respiratory system or the digestive system may be found in the reproductive system. But the latest study in China proves that Coronavirus is a highly contagious virus, as it has been able to make its way to the semen of some male patients.