Quarantining before and after exposure can minimize transmission to others. Those who have partners outside their household should get tested regularly for COVID-19 (about five to seven days after a sexual encounter). Whereas in STI prevention, the central tenet was to minimize the exchange of body fluids, with COVID-19, it is to minimize air exchange. Public health officials in the Netherlands, New York, British Columbia, and others have issued pragmatic guidelines for risk navigation. Several public health departments recall the lessons we learned during the HIV/AIDS epidemic, including dusting off the almost 40-year-old pamphlet “ How to Have Sex in an Epidemic.” Recognizing sex and sexuality as a fundamental human need, they have issued guidelines on how to have safe sex during a pandemic. What we have learned repeatedly is that this is ineffective. Initially, in response to a troubling wave of young gay men dying (soon followed by others), the official government response was to advise abstinence. We learned that this is not a sustainable strategy in the last pandemic-HIV/AIDS. One option has been for people to refrain entirely from any kind of dating or sex.
