Official websites use. Share sensitive information only on official, secure websites. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material.
If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. In this study, we aimed to assess the impact of the pandemic on HIV testing and linkage services at three public health facilities in Freetown, Sierra Leone. Statistical analyses were conducted in Stata Of the people tested for HIV in the three facilities, Overall, Of the HIV diagnosis, We found significant disruptions in HIV testing and linkage services at different levels of service delivery during the COVID pandemic, underscoring the need to strengthen essential health services during public health emergencies.
After it was first reported in China in , and subsequently declared a global pandemic in March [ 1 , 2 ], the Coronavirus disease COVID prompted countries around the world to institute containment measures such as widespread lockdowns and movement restrictions in an attempt to contain it [ 3 ].
As a result, in many countries, access to health care, especially non-COVID care, was compromised, leading to increased morbidity and mortality [ 4 β 6 ]. Following the detection of the first case of COVID in Sierra Leone on March 31, , the government quickly implemented a series of containment measures, including lockdowns, movement restrictions and curfews, similar to the global response to the pandemic [ 7 ].
While these restrictive measures were mitigating strategies to contain the spread of the disease and reduce the number of cases requiring treatment at any given time, they also posed considerable challenges to the utilization of essential health services [ 8 ]. People living with HIV are a vulnerable population that are likely to be affected by the disruption of services during public health emergencies [ 9 , 10 ]. Maintaining continuity of HIV care during a pandemic is especially difficult due to limited access to HIV testing and linkage services [ 10 ].
