In March 2020, the World Health Organization declared the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic caused by SARS-CoV-2. This global crisis overwhelmed healthcare systems, including in Brazil, adversely affecting the control of several infectious diseases, such as HIV. It is therefore essential to evaluate the pandemic’s impact on key HIV control indicators. This study aimed to determine how interruptions in healthcare services affected the dynamics of HIV diagnosis and monitoring at national and regional levels. To evaluate the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on HIV/AIDS prevalence, diagnosis, and treatment indicators in Brazil and to analyze time trends before and after the pandemic. National epidemiological analysis using SINAN data, including all reported HIV and AIDS cases between 2007 and 2022. Individual cases were aggregated annually for HIV notifications and AIDS deaths. An Interrupted Time-Series Analysis (ITSA) was applied to examine pandemic effects on national and regional HIV notification trends and AIDS mortality. An Auto-Regressive Integrated Moving Average (ARIMA) model was used to analyze pre-intervention temporal patterns and predict a counterfactual scenario representing how HIV trends might have evolved without the pandemic. We calculated the mean and overall difference between counterfactual and observed post-intervention rates. The study suggests that the COVID-19 pandemic led to an estimated 9% reduction in adult HIV notifications (95% CI: −35% to +39%) and an estimated 36% increase in AIDS mortality (95% CI: −8% to +164%) compared with the counterfactual scenario without the pandemic. These impacts reflect widespread disruption of healthcare services, including HIV testing, diagnosis, and treatment, during the public health emergency. Strategies such as self-testing, extended drug dispensing, and telemedicine should be consolidated and expanded to maintain patient engagement with the healthcare system and to sustain efforts to control the HIV/AIDS epidemic as a public health priority.
Sousa-Peres et al. (Sun,) studied this question.