YOU should avoid having sex for around 30 days after recovering from coronavirus, one expert has said.
It comes amid fears that Covid-19 could be sexually transmitted, after traces of the virus were found in men’s semen.
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Now, a senior medical expert at the Thai Disease Control Department has claimed that patients who have overcome the disease need to hold off before jumping into bed with their partners.
Citing a Chinese study that warned that semen could carry the virus, Veerawat Manosutthi said people should even avoid kissing.
So far in Ireland there have been 1,500 fatalities from the virus and globally it has killed over 302,000 people.
Manosutthi claimed that people should “wear a condom when they start to become sexually active again even after 30 days”.
Earlier this month researchers claimed that men who had recovered from the infection still had Covid-19 in their semen.
Chinese scientists analysed the output of 38 patients who had caught the illness – 15 who were still in hospital and 23 who had recovered.
Overall six men, or 16 per cent, had the virus Sars-CoV-2, which causes coronavirus, in their sperm sample – and two of them were already over their illness.
INFECTION RATES
Scientists say it suggests the bug can persist much longer in the testes and could be spread later through sex.
Writing in the journal JAMA Network Open, researcher Dr Shixi Zhang, from the Shangqiu Municipal Hospital, says “the survival of SARS-CoV-2 in a recovering patient’s semen maintains the likelihood to infect others”.
He added if bigger trials show coronavirus is passed on during sex, the recovering men should be encouraged to “abstain or use condoms” to prevent transmission.
Speaking to Thai news site Khaosod English, Manosutthi said “kissing should also be avoided as it is also known that it can spread through the mouth”.
His comments come after researchers found the virus particles could be spread through talking.
A study revealed that speech droplets generated by asymptomatic carriers of the illness is a mode of transmission.
The study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in the US, used sensitive laser light scattering observations that revealed that loud speech can actually emit thousands of droplets per second.
In an environment which is stagnant they disappear from the window of view within 8-14 minutes.
The study stated that this “confirms there is a substantial probability that normal speaking causes airborne virus transmission in confined environments”.
As part of the study the researchers asked participants to repeat various phrases and used sensitive lasers to visual the droplets they produced.
They estimated that just a minute of speaking could generate at least 1,000 virus carrying droplets.
The study was conducted in a tightly controlled environment and did not factor in different levels of air circulation and temperature variants that you would find in a real world analysis.
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Dr Michael Cotterell, NERC Research Fellow, University of Bristol said the findings of the study were “not surprising”.
“The laboratory research techniques used are novel and certainly provide compelling evidence that micron-sized speech droplets have significant lifetimes (several minutes).
“One detail that is less clear is whether the aerosol introduced to the researchers’ enclosure could be contaminated by simply opening the speaker shutter, and therefore whether all the particles sampled correspond to speech droplets.”