Changes in sexual behavior, PrEP adherence, and access to sexual health services due to the COVID-19 pandemic among a cohort of PrEP-using MSM in the South
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Background: The COVID-19 pandemic has had unforeseen consequences on the delivery of HIV and STD prevention services. However, little is known about how the pandemic has impacted PrEP-using men who have sex with men (MSM). Methods: Data come from an online cohort of PrEP-using MSM in the Southern United States from October 2019 to July 2020. Participants were administered ten surveys in total, including one ad hoc survey specifically on COVID-19. We conducted a cross-sectional analysis of this ad hoc survey (n=56) and present changes in sexual behaviors and utilization of and access to sexual health services. Using linear mixed-effects regression models, we also analyzed data from the larger cohort (n=78) and document how sexual behaviors and PrEP use varied longitudinally focusing on three months: February (pre-pandemic), April (early pandemic), and June (later in the pandemic). Results: A fifth of participants discontinued or changed how often they take PrEP because of COVID-19. A quarter of the cohort documented challenges when attempting to access PrEP, HIV testing, or STD testing. For all sexual behaviors examined longitudinally-number of male sexual partners, anal sex acts, condomless anal sex, oral sex (all measured in the past 2 weeks)-there was a significant decrease from February to April followed by a significant increase from April to June. Discussion: Our findings suggest reduced access to and utilization of STD and HIV services coupled with a continuation of behaviors which confer STD/HIV risk. Ensuring appropriate delivery of STD/HIV prevention services during this pandemic is imperative.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".