Who needs birth control when you've got an international pandemic?
As people in isolation worldwide abstain from sex during the lockdowns, condom sales have taken a dive, according to Reckit Benckiser, the parent company of British condom maker Durex. This news comes just a month after COVID-19 concerns caused Malaysia’s Karex Bhd, globe’s biggest condom producer, to shut down three of its factories temporarily.
Reckitt Benckiser CEO Laxman Narasimhan attributed the notable sales decline to the strict social distancing measures taking a “toll on the number of intimate occasions in the UK,” reports the Guardian.
Narasimhan stated that the amount of sex people were having had “gone down a lot in Italy” and also fell in other places such as the UK, because people stopped having casual hook-ups, since meeting up with someone outside the same household is against lockdown rules.
He added that young people in the UK were having “significantly” less sex than before the lockdown started on March 23. “What you see is this virus is having a toll on the number of intimate occasions in the UK,” stated Narasimhan.
As a result, younger people in the United Kingdom and Italy have experienced a significant drop in intimacy, though Reckitt Benckiser has seen soaring sales in products other than contraceptives. Last week alone, the hygiene giant sold a record-breaking amount of disinfectants as people rushed to hoard provisions for fighting the novel coronavirus.
Meanwhile across the pond, US residents have resorted to cyber affairs to beat the boredom, as the number of online affairs has surged amid widespread stay-at-home orders. In its most recent study, online dating service Ashley Madison found that among its users, 30% of women and 14% of men were having virtual sex with partners outside of their primary relationship.
