BACKGROUND: With the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, reported rates of chlamydia and gonorrhea dropped and remained low for several months of 2020 as compared to 2019. Additional data are needed to reveal causes of reported rate changes. Here, we analyze STI-related conversations from the online-discussion platform Reddit to gain insight into the role of the pandemic on public experience of STIs in 2020. METHOD: We collected data from Pushshift's and Reddit's application programming interfaces via programs coded in Python. We focused data collection on the 'r/STD' subreddit. Collected submissions contained the term(s) "covid" and/or "coronavirus" and were submitted between 01/01/2020 and 12/31/2020. We collected the title and text of each submission. We used a Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) algorithm to create a topic model of post content and complemented this approach with key term analysis and qualitative hand-coding. RESULTS: Of the 288 posts collected, 148 were complete and included in analyses. LDA revealed four main topics in the collected posts: narration of sexual experiences, STI testing, crowdsourcing of visual STI diagnoses, and descriptions of STI-related pains and treatments. Hand-coding of COVID-19 mentions revealed pandemic-related anxieties about STI care seeking and experienced delays in and changes to quality of STI care received. CONCLUSIONS: References to COVID-19 and associated mitigation efforts were woven into Reddit posts pertaining to several domains of STI care. These data support the notion that Reddit discussions may represent a valuable source of STI information, standing to corroborate and further contextualize STI survey and surveillance work.

We examined mean chlamydia and gonorrhea case rates from 2014-2018 by categorizing U.S counties by social vulnerability. Overall, these rates were approximately 1.0 to 2.4 times higher in high vulnerability counties than low vulnerability counties. Percentage change in case rates from low to high social vulnerability counties varied by sex, geographic region, and urbanicity.

Two decades ago in the USA, partner services programmes and HIV surveillance programmes frequently had very little cooperation, with guidance typically more focused on limiting sharing of surveillance data with prevention programmes (eg, partner services) than encouraging it.1 Stigma and discrimination experienced by people with HIV, especially those who were members of socially marginalised populations, fuelled reluctance to share surveillance data that identified infected people.2 | | The emergence of antiretroviral therapy (ART), however, changed HIV partner services. The availability of therapy offered the opportunity for public health investigators to not only notify people exposed to HIV and offer testing, but to connect partners infected with HIV with care. In the USA, public health recommendations reflected a change in emphasis towards use of surveillance data to improve programme services and in getting people exposed to HIV notified, evaluated, and linked to care or prevention as needed.3,4 In The Lancet HIV, Chi-Chi N Udeagu and colleagues5 demonstrate the use of HIV partner services in New York City to not only bring newly diagnosed partners to care, but to assess those previously diagnosed and ensure they are either in care and virally suppressed or are relinked to ART services. In doing so, the programme provides a health service to notified people not in care or adequately treated (the individual benefit) and a public health benefit in that returning individuals to care reduces the number of persons in a given population who could plausibly transmit infection.

Objective: To determine whether sexual-risk and STI-testing behaviors differ by college student status.Participants: Sexually experienced 17- to 25-year-olds from a 2013 nationally representative panel survey that evaluated the "Get Yourself Tested" campaign. Non-students (n = 628), 2-yr (n = 319), and 4-yr college students (n = 587) were surveyed.Methods: Bivariate analyses and multiple logistic regression were used.Results: Students were less likely than non-students to have had an early sexual debut and to have not used condoms in their most recent relationship. 4-yr students were less likely than non-students to have had multiple sexual partners. 2-yr students were less likely than non-students to have not used contraception in their most recent relationship.Conclusions: 2-yr and 4-yr college students were less likely than non-students to engage in sexual-risk behaviors. Given potentially greater risk for STI acquisition among non-students, identification and implementation of strategies to increase sexual health education and services among this population is needed.