Give people a lot of time off, alone or together and you can assume that there’s going to be some sex — and probably a lot of it. That’s just human nature.

So, it should come as no surprise then, that since all of this COVID-19 madness has consumed the world and forced us to stay inside for so many weeks, that people have been having more sex than normal. Which, as the medical community of Victoria is discovering, is causing some unforeseen health issues.

Namely, traumatic penis injuries. Which are not something that the doctors or nurses of BC are totally used to seeing.

"With a famously elderly population in Victoria, B.C., male genitourinary (GU) trauma is rarely encountered; we likely do not see more than a handful of cases per year," write University of British Columbia (UBC), in a paper they recently published in the Canadian Urological Association Journal.

Recently, though that has changed drastically. Since the COVID-19 “safe-at-home” ordinances went into effect, penis problems have become a much more common sight in Victoria’s hospitals. In the span of just a single week, doctors saw six different men come in, all with different penile injuries. It was one hell of a week, by just about anybody’s standards.

Two of the injuries were penile fractures (aka “broken dicks”) sustained from heterosexual intercourse with their partners on top. Which is to say, these two gentlemen were getting ridden so hard their members snapped under the pressure.

Then you have the poor soul who suffered an erection that lasted longer than four hours, by a long shot — by the time he came into the hospital his Johnson had been hard as a rock for four days. Then there’s the ruptured testicle incident; the “I masturbated so much, my junk is raw” accident; and of course, who could forget the episode where a man’s penis was ravaged by an angry dog (I sure would love to know just how that happened).

Fortunately, none of these injuries were life threatening — though they may have seriously wounded a few of these men’s prides.

"It is difficult to say whether these injuries would have occurred without the societal changes in the pandemic,” write the researchers from UBC. “One can speculate that the increased time at home may have led to higher rates of sexual intercourse, with potentially increased riskier sexual practices."

Who could have guessed that a respiratory disease like COVID-19 would end up hospitalizing so many men for such a strange and terrible affliction? This pandemic is (clearly) having an indirect effect on people’s sexual health — and that likely extends well beyond Victoria or even BC at large. A lot of people all around the world are engaging in riskier sexual activity than they would normally.

Which is putting a lot of innocent penises directly into the line of fire.