Impact of COVID-19 pandemic on HIV viremia: a single-center cohort study in northern Italy

BACKGROUND: Brescia Province, northern Italy, was one of the worst epicenters of the COVID-19 pandemic. The division of infectious diseases of ASST (Azienda Socio Sanitaria Territoriale) Spedali Civili Hospital of Brescia had to face a great number of inpatients with severe COVID-19 infection and to ensure the continuum of care for almost 4000 outpatients with HIV infection actively followed by us. In a recent manuscript we described the impact of the pandemic on continuum of care in our HIV cohort expressed as number of missed visits, number of new HIV diagnosis, drop in ART (antiretroviral therapy) dispensation and number of hospitalized HIV patients due to SARS-CoV-2 infection. In this short communication, we completed the previous article with data of HIV plasmatic viremia of the same cohort before and during pandemic. METHODS: We considered all HIV-patients in stable ART for at least 6 months and with at least 1 available HIV viremia in the time window March 01–November 30, 2019, and another group of HIV patients with the same two requisites but in different time windows of the COVID-19 period (March 01–May 31, 2020, and June 01–November 30, 2020). For patients with positive viremia (PV) during COVID-19 period, we reported also the values of viral load (VL) just before and after PV. Results: the percentage of patients with PV during COVID-19 period was lower than the previous year (2.8% vs 7%). Only 1% of our outpatients surely suffered from pandemic in term of loss of previous viral suppression. CONCLUSIONS: Our efforts to limit the impact of pandemic on our HIV outpatients were effective to ensure HIV continuum of care.