This was a thing spoken about at the beginning. I remember during lockdown reading a booklet or two about safer sex in covid times. (You can picture the recommandations!)
An internet search didn’t yield much info about if the covid virus is transmissible through intercourse.
Meaning, I’ve found a couple of pages about how it’s probably not, but I like to think of the SDMB as that place where one usually can find someone who knows about the oddest piece of information.
So, does anyone has some more recent info?
Also, if it’s a respiratory virus, could it even contaminate someone through the vagina/anus?
Can it work that way?
Leaving aside a couple of fairly kinky scenarios, people who are having sex are likely to be in the kind of proximity which favours the short range aerosol/airborne transmission of disease. So even if you catch covid during a sexual encounter, the likelihood is that you caught it in the conventional way.
Well, I think you can say this to them: the virus has been detected in semen, salive and vaginal fluids, so nobody can say that it’s impossible for Covid to be transmitted through sexual contact. But it seems the risk of actual sexual transmission would be low. It would certainly be a fraction of the risk of respiratory transmission that you would run in an intimate relationship.
So, if your partner has Covid, avoiding sex is not, on its own, going to do much to reduce the risk of transmission.
Even if your sexual contact is casual or, um, commercial in nature the risk of transmission remains predominantly a risk of respiratory transmission.
“The highest expression was observed in the intestinal tract, followed by kidney, testis, gallbladder and heart … several organs had an expression level just above or below cutoff, including liver, female reproductive organs” The protein expression profile of ACE2 in human tissues - PMC (nih.gov)
It appears likely that direct infection of the rectum is possible, but direct infection of the vagina is unlikely. (Lung problems are associated with infection of the surface of blood vessels)
There was an outbreak of fooferaw recenty over transmission of spike protein via sex - though the claim involved spike protein “shedding” from vaccinated people.
This particular misinformation superspreader event was courtesy of a once semi-respected scientist, Pierre Kory, who’s now gone deeply down the antivax rabbit hole.