The popular belief is that sexual activity must have declined during the pandemic, but that relies on the trope that young people go to bars and sleep with strangers and that lessened.

Some people were instead getting busy during the pandemic more than ever before. Older men with erectile dysfunction prescriptions. The qualifier "prescriptions" is because the number of men using them dwarfs the cases of actual erectile problems, the pill just makes it better.

In a review of National Sales Perspective data, the researchers found that sales of prescription daily-use erectile dysfunction drugs, such as tadalafil, soared after March 2020, when the country went into the nationwide lockdown.

Sales rates of the widely available erectile dysfunction drugs as a proxy for the amount of sexual activity--and compared the changes in sales trends pre-pandemic, before March 2020, and after the pandemic was declared, between March and December of 2020. To account for possible fluctuations of drug sales due to other factors, such as ease of access to pharmacies, the researchers tracked the sales of urological drugs--which didn't change in the months after the pandemic was declared.


Image: Storyblocks

After a short decrease in sales in March and April, the sales of erectile dysfunction drugs have enjoyed a steady increase ever since. The sales of tadalafil, in particular--a longer-acting drug designed to be taken daily to help with spontaneous sexual activity--nearly doubled between February and December of 2020.

"We saw a huge spike in sales of daily use erectile dysfunction drugs, which suggests that some people were having more spontaneous sex than ever--with their partners at home, they wanted to always be ready," said senior author Benjamin Davies, M.D., director of the Urologic Oncology Program at UPMC Hillman Cancer Center and professor at Pitt's Department of Urology.