Men's genitals, meet the coronavirus

This figure, that men with COVID are six times more likely to subsequently experience erectile dysfunction, seemingly comes from an online survey of 100 Italian men conducted in April 2020. Twenty-five of them said they had had COVID, while the remaining 75 said they had not. When asked about erectile dysfunction, under a third of COVID-positive men essentially said they were experiencing it, but only a tenth of the COVID-negative men. When crunching the numbers, the increased odds were calculated as 5.66, rounded up to 6 for the public service announcement. Based on this study, men with COVID were six times more likely to report erectile dysfunction.

There is much to unpack here and the authors of the survey have done it for us. This was an online survey in which people were asked to recall and self-report their COVID status and their performance in the bedroom. The survey did not ask anything about other factors that might affect someone’s erection, like other health conditions, any treatment they might have required for COVID, or their lifestyle. Moreover, those increased odds of nearly 6 were actually part of a very large confidence interval, meaning that the true value is somewhere in between 1.5 and 24. With only 25 men reporting having had COVID, and only 7 of whom seemed to have erectile dysfunction, it is difficult to get a robust idea of how common post-COVID erectile dysfunction is based on this survey. It is also unclear to me if the survey, which used a five-item questionnaire to evaluate erectile dysfunction, asked if the men had a history of erectile dysfunction pre-COVID. Was the problem always there or was this new?