Abstract
IntroductionThe COVID-19 pandemic is becoming a major hazard to public health worldwide. This is causing a significant impact on life and physical health, as well as on the psychological well-being of the general population. Since the emotional distress and the social restrictions caused by this epidemic, it must be expected that its impact will also extend to sexual health. The purpose of this study, the first including a large sample of the Spanish general population, was to analyze sexual behavior during the 99 days of confinement in Spain (INSIDE Project).MethodOne thousand four hundred forty-eight Spanish people, between 18 and 60 years old, were evaluated through an online survey during April 2020. The variables analyzed were the physical and social environment during confinement, sexual desire, type of sexual activity, masturbation, sexual intercourse, online sexual activity, general sexual frequency, sexual fantasies, degree of self-control over sexual drive, sexual abuse, general impact of confinement on sexuality, and emotional mood.ResultsConfinement has affected the sexual life of half of the Spanish population (47.7%), especially women. Those who reported a worsening of their sexual life are almost three times more (37.9%) than those who reported an improvement (14.4%).ConclusionsDifferent factors have been significant predictors of the positive or negative evaluation about the impact of this confinement on sexual life, such as gender, couple life, privacy, stress level, and the perception of confinement as unbearable.Policy ImplicationsThese results have important implications for the public health and more especially sexual health of the Spanish population.
Highlights
The COVID-19 pandemic is becoming a major hazard to public health worldwide
It provides information about how the confinement and social distancing may impact on human sexual behavior. It offers a little studied area in which the COVID-19 pandemic has had a severe impact worldwide and in Spanish society, in which the disease wreaks havoc (Ballester-Arnal & Gil-Llario, 2020). It shows how half of the Spanish population has experienced important changes in their sexual life during confinement, but these changes have gone in different directions according to a series of factors, such as gender, couple life, privacy, the degree of stress, and the experience of the confinement as unbearable or very hard
Sexuality is shown as a complex phenomenon, which presents a great diversity in the way it is affected by a situation as complex and threatening as the confinement caused by a pandemic
Summary
The COVID-19 pandemic is becoming a major hazard to public health worldwide This is causing a significant impact on life and physical health, as well as on the psychological well-being of the general population. Results Confinement has affected the sexual life of half of the Spanish population (47.7%), especially women. The disease caused by novel coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 was declared as a Public Health Emergency of International Concern on January 30, 2020, by the International Health Regulations Emergency Committee. After that, this was recognized as a global pandemic on March 11, 2020, by the World Health Organization (WHO) (Instituto de Salud Carlos III, 2020a).
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