The Journal of the American Academy of Dermatology has taken down a letter on whether people should abstain from sex during the coronavirus pandemic, but the editor says the article is not being retracted.
Meanwhile, researchers in France have retracted a paper in which they’d claimed to have found replication of the virus that causes Covid-19 in the dialysis fluid of a patient with kidney disease. Again, hasty publication appears to be involved. We’ve been tracking retractions of Covid-19 articles on our website, and, let’s just say, the list is almost certainly a trailing indicator of the robustness of the science here — as it is with retractions during any period.
Back to the letter. “COVID-19: Should sexual practices be discouraged during the pandemic?” was written by ZhiQiang Yin, of the Department of Dermatology at the First Affiliated Hospital of Nanjing Medical University, in China. Yin submitted the article on April 14. The journal accepted it on the 16th and published it on April 30th.
According to the notice:
The publisher regrets that this article has been temporarily removed. A replacement will appear as soon as possible in which the reason for the removal of the article will be specified, or the article will be reinstated.
Dirk Elston, the top editor of the journal, told us:
It is not a retraction. There were language issues and the article will be reposted once the galley proofs are received.
Yin did not respond to a request for comment.
Before it was removed the letter generated a smattering of attention on Twitter, largely in the form of laughing emojis.
Update, 2000 UTC, 6/20/20: The paper has been replaced with what looks like a toned-down version.
The kidney paper, “First viral replication of Covid-19 identified in the peritoneal dialysis fluid of a symptomatic patient,” was written by Denis Fouque, Mathilde Nouvier, of the Université de Lyon, and colleagues. Per the abstract:
The COVID-19 pandemic is characterized by a disease with mainly respiratory tropism and varying severity.
Viral excretion of COVID-19 has been described in both urine and stool with the risk of contamination by stool. No viral replication in the peritoneal dialysis fluid has been reported to date.
We report an observation demonstrating the presence of the virus in the peritoneal dialysis drainage fluid of a COVID-19 patient. This underlines the importance in COVID-19 patients of considering dialysis fluid as a possible source of contamination.
But that claim proved to be the result of an apparent false-positive test for the virus. According to the retraction notice:
By this letter we would like to retract our case report entitled « First viral replication of Covid-19 identified in the peritoneal dialysis fluid of a symptomatic patient» that we submitted to your journal one week ago. We indeed wanted to inform the renal community of a potential presence of Covid-19 virus in the peritoneal dialysis fluid in patients undergoing peritoneal dialysis treatment. However, the patient general status impaired and he was transferred to an intensive care unit for acute myocardial insufficiency. During this stay, he was re-checked for a number of other organs alterations. A total of 7 RT-PCR SARS-Cov2 tests , validated by the National Reference Center, were done : 2 by nasopharyngeal swabs, 1 in bronchoalveolar lavage, 3 peritoneal dialysate and one in stool. A serological test was also performed. All tests were found negative. The CT scan was analyzed again by a specialized radiologist and although a COVID-19 pulmonary disease was likely, it was not possible to rule out a pulmonary edema secondary to an acute myocarditis of different origin.
Therefore, based on these later information, and after careful discussion with the virologists, we think that the first positive PCR result was erroneous, without clear explanation for this. Until new cases appear, the fact that two subsequent peritoneal dialysate carefully processed were negative indicates that we cannot reliably prove a peritoneal dialysate contamination by COVID-19 virus in our patient. We deeply apologize for this premature publication.
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Reading the 398-word Yin paper, I agree that the rush to publish permitted a poorly worded piece to be published. Unfortunately, if only the language is updated, the content will still be almost entirely the unsupported speculations of the author. Example:
“The hypothesis of sexual transmission was based on fecal-oral transmission, which we think is a bit far-fetched. Although those mentioned forms of sex are not rare worldwide, it’s still not a regular form of intercourse.”