COVID-19 and Disruptions to HIV Testing and Prevention

We would like to share ideas on the publication on the article by Zapata et al. (2022). We agree that the COVID-19 pandemic might affect preventive health care service. Both patient and health care providers might have an increased concern on disease transmission which can sometimes cause disruption on normal primary health service. In our setting, the similar problem occurs. Although primary health care function still remained during the pandemic and lockdown period, there was also a decreasing number of local health care users for HIV testing and prevention services. An important issue that is little mentioned in the literature is privacy. HIV counseling and testing requires privacy and might take time. It might be difficult during the COVID-19 pandemic. In many health care centers, pre-registration and mandatory check-in are required for getting healthcare service aiming tractability for COVID-19 control in case that there is an incident. Barriers might occur due to the health care service policies (Nalubega et al., 2021). This policy directly invades privacy of health care users who would like to attend HIV counseling and testing services. Also, although telemedicine was widely used during the COVID-19 outbreak and recommended for HIV care service (Salgado et al., 2021), telemedicine might have privacy concerns and not be accepted by users who have HIV-related problem. Hence, it can result in a significant decreased number of users.

Declarations

Conflict of interest

None.