American physician Dr. Marc Siegel, appearing on the Tucker Carlson Tonight show, told host Tucker Carlson that despite findings that coronavirus cannot be sexually transmitted, there are still risks involved with having sex during the pandemic.

Dr. Siegel is referring to the new study conducted by researchers at the University of Utah and Huazhong University of Science and Technology. The researchers analyzed the semen from 34 Chinese men one month after they had tested positive for coronavirus. The results revealed that there were no traces of COVID-19 within their semen samples.

“The fact that in this small, preliminary study that it appears the virus that causes COVID-19 doesn’t show up in the testes or semen could be an important finding,” said Dr. James M. Hotaling, co-author of the study and professor at the University of Utah. “If a disease like COVID-19 were sexually transmittable that would have major implications for disease prevention and could have serious consequences for a man’s long-term reproductive health.”

Dr. Siegel emphasized that while this was certainly good news, people should not be getting “too excited” if they think this means they can start having sex with those outside their household.

“With all the asymptomatic spread going around of this virus, what are the chances that you can actually follow social distancing under those circumstances?” he warned.

If someone is asymptomatic, they show no symptoms of having the virus but can still easily spread it, and the virus can spread in several ways. You can still catch the virus from physical contact with someone infected, touching contaminated surfaces, and through exposure to infected respiratory droplets.

Dr. Siegel then went on to discuss the new antibody “surveillance studies that are coming out” across the United States.

In Santa Clara County, Calif., research was done by Stanford University researchers on the prevalence of “antibodies to SARS-CoV-2 in a sample of 3,330 people.” From the results, the researchers estimated that up to 4.16 percent of the county’s population had already contracted the virus. They further noted that the “prevalence of SARS-CoV-2 antibodies in Santa Clara County implies that the infection is much more widespread than indicated by the number of confirmed cases.”

SARS-CoV-2 is a scientific term for COVID-19.

Moreover, according to a preliminary study by researchers from the University of Miami, it is likely that 6 percent of Miami-Dade’s population have been infected with coronavirus. The University of Miami conducted two weeks of COVID-19 antibody testing where 1,400 Miami-Dade residents were tested. Half of the people in the study who tested positive for antibodies said they experienced no symptoms.

Dr. Siegel told Carlson that all these results imply that not only is the virus more widespread than initially thought, but there may be many more asymptomatic cases as well. 

“To give you an idea what those numbers mean, for 10,000 diagnosed cases in Miami Dade County, there’s about 180,000 people out there that probably have had asymptomatic spread and don’t know it by these figures,” Dr. Siegl remarked.

The United States currently has the most confirmed cases in the world and the highest death toll, at more than 52,000 deaths. In New York City, the epicenter of the outbreak, it was found that 21 percent of citizens who were tested had coronavirus antibodies.

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