Cyrus Ghaznavi, Yuta Tanoue, Takayuki Kawashima, Akifumi Eguchi, Daisuke Yoneoka, Haruka Sakamoto, Peter Ueda, Masahiro Ishikane, Naokatsu Ando, Yusuke Miyazato, Shuhei Nomura
Abstract
The COVID-19 pandemic has had variable effects on the rates of STIs reported across the globe. This study sought to assess how the number of STI reports changed during the pandemic in Japan.
We used national infectious disease surveillance data from the National Institute of Infectious Diseases (Tokyo, Japan) for the period between January 2013 and December 2021. We compared reported rates of chlamydia, gonorrhoea, condyloma acuminata and genital herpes, as well as total notifications for HIV/AIDS and syphilis during the pandemic versus previous years in Japan. We used a quasi-Poisson regression to determine whether any given week or month between January 2018 and December 2021 had a significant excess or deficit of STIs. Notification values above or below the 95% upper and lower prediction thresholds were considered as statistically significant. The start of the pandemic was defined as January 2020.
Chlamydia generally remained within predicted range during the pandemic period. Reporting of gonorrhoea was significantly higher than expected throughout early-to-mid 2021 but otherwise generally remained within predicted range prior to 2021. Condyloma, herpes and HIV/AIDS reporting were transiently significantly lower than expected throughout the pandemic period, but no significant periods of higher-than-expected reporting were detected. Syphilis showed widespread evidence of significantly lower-than-predicted reporting throughout 2020 but eventually reversed, showing significantly higher-than-predicted reporting in mid-to-late 2021.
The COVID-19 pandemic was associated with variable changes in the reporting of STIs in Japan. Higher-than-predicted reporting was more likely to be observed in the later phases of the pandemic. These changes may have been attributable to pandemic-related changes in sexual behaviour and decreased STI clinic attendance and testing, but further research on the long-term impact of the pandemic on STIs is necessary.
This research output has an Altmetric Attention Score of 33. This is our high-level measure of the quality and quantity of online attention that it has received. This Attention Score, as well as the ranking and number of research outputs shown below, was calculated when the research output was last mentioned on 05 August 2024.
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#1,268,767
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Outputs from Sexually Transmitted Infections
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Outputs of similar age from Sexually Transmitted Infections
#3
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Altmetric has tracked 26,420,475 research outputs across all sources so far. Compared to these this one has done particularly well and is in the 95th percentile: it's in the top 5% of all research outputs ever tracked by Altmetric.
So far Altmetric has tracked 3,891 research outputs from this source. They typically receive more attention than average, with a mean Attention Score of 9.6. This one has done particularly well, scoring higher than 96% of its peers.
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We're also able to compare this research output to 30 others from the same source and published within six weeks on either side of this one. This one has done particularly well, scoring higher than 90% of its contemporaries.
