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- Impact of COVID-19 pandemic in communitybased testing and diagnosis of HIV, HCV, HBV and other STI in PortugalPublication . Melo, Mafalda de Almeida Duarte Bessa de; Meireles, Paula Cristina Coelho Ribeiro de; Maio, António Gonçalves Candeias da GuerraBackground: In March 2020, Portugal registered its first cases of COVID-19. Since then, we have seen unprecedented changes in our communities, economically, and in access to health care including access to sexually transmitted infections prevention, testing and linkage to care. To better understand the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic in testing provision at community-based testing centres in Portugal, we analyzed the numbers of testing sessions, tests performed for each infection, and proportion of reactive results from January 2016 to December 2020. Methods: We used data from 26 community-based testing centres’ number of testing sessions, HIV, HBV, HCV and Syphilis tests performed and its results. To assess the trend of the number of testing sessions, number of tests performed and the percentage of reactive tests over time an additive seasonal decomposition was used. We implemented a simple decomposition using the 30-day moving average to isolate the trend of the number of tests, and we calculated the seasonal component by computing an average value of the relative number of tests for each month across the entire span of the data (2016–2020). The decomposition error was then computed by removing the trend and seasonal components from the original time series data. We also searched for breakpoints throughout the time period analysed. Results: The trend for the number of tests increased, with a peak in middle 2019 followed by a stark drop-off leading into 2020. The seasonal components showed an annual spike in the number of tests during November and a decrease in April. We also pinpointed a breakpoint between March and June 2020 regarding the number of sessions. However, the percentages of reactive HIV and HCV tests increased during this period. Nevertheless, even under strict measures to mitigate the SARS-CoV-2 transmission, activity seems to have returned almost to normal in the second semester. Conclusions: The COVID-19 pandemic impacted the community-based provision of care, the number of testing sessions and, consequently, HIV, HBV, HCV and Syphilis diagnosis. However, population characteristics, as well as efforts made by community-based healthcare services, might have helped these centres to resume their activity in the second semester.