Check out this excerpt from yesterday's Wall Street Journal. As Dr. Poon notes (no, I didn't make it up and yes, it would be a great handle) that the virus needs to be cultured before we can tell if it's infectious. Also note the comments of Dr. Brooks, who is the chief medical officer in charge of the Covid-19 response for the CDC.
Coronavirus Is Found in Semen of Covid-19 Patients
WSJ 5-7-2020
The new coronavirus has been found in the semen of infected individuals, according to Chinese researchers, raising the prospect that the virus could be sexually transmitted.
The study, other researchers warn, also raises many questions. It doesn’t explain how much viral load was present in the sperm; nor did it examine whether the virus can be transmitted through sexual activity. The study, conducted at China’s Shangqiu Municipal Hospital, was described in a research letter published Thursday by the JAMA Network of medical journals.
It is the first to detect the virus in reproductive fluids. Further research is needed to understand whether safe-sex practices should be part of Covid-19-prevention efforts, say medical experts who read the paper.
“These are intriguing results,” said John Brooks, chief medical officer for the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Covid-19 response. But it doesn’t mean that semen is infectious, he noted. “When we’re looking everywhere for this virus, we’re finding its footprints in different places in the body—whether that’s a trace or if it’s a big foot is very hard to say.”
No known U.S. infections have spread through sexual contact, Dr. Brooks said. Some other viruses, including mosquito-borne Zika, can spread by sexual contact.
Liona Poon, an obstetrics and gynecology professor at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, noted the study falls short of explaining how much viral load was present in semen. “Was it fragments, or whole virus particulate? Until the virus is isolated and cultured, we don’t know if it’s infectious,” she said.