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As an older millennial, it’s interesting to me observe the difference with which HIV/AIDS and COVID has been treated. While untreated HIV infection is more leth

As an older millennial, it’s interesting to me observe the difference with which HIV/AIDS and COVID has been treated. While untreated HIV infection is more lethal than COVID, COVID has killed more people in the past 4 years than HIV/AIDS did in the past 40+. My childhood was filled with warnings and media depicting the tragedy of HIV/AIDS, the surrounding bigotry, and the history of this pandemic still has some cache. COVID, conversely, has all but disappeared from the national stage, despite still actively killing large numbers of people. Pointing this out even now is likely to draw accusals of one being a terrified nut or obsessive. It’s such a drastic change, that it’s hard to reconcile a past where public health and the moral dimensions around our practice of it played such a prominent part in our culture with the disregard and denial of the present. EDIT: To clarify, I’m speaking about my experience of both pandemics in the US. Worldwide, AIDS has of course killed more people than COVID.

tristor 3y ago
I've noticed the same thing, and I'm pretty sure it's because COVID no longer features as part of identity politics. It's the identity politics that drove the AIDS discussion, and it's been the identify politics that drove the COVID discussion. Now that has passed, COVID is no longer a topic people care to discuss regularly, while AIDS is still a forefront topic.
- bugglebeetle 3y ago
  While this may be true to an extent, it doesn’t address why fighting AIDS outside the context of its impact on the LGBTQ community, e.g. in the developing world, still figures so prominently in American culture and public policy. I expect that the real reason is actually something more sinister, where the politics of the US have devolved to a point where almost everyone will accept the “they deserved it” narrative that was used to vilify those with HIV/AIDS, whether it be of the “they’re were old/fat/weak” or “unvaccinated” variety.
  - DelaneyM 3y ago
    Or possibly it’s like the hole in the ozone layer, which has also faded from public discourse, because thanks to that huge amount of press and action it’s been largely addressed. You’re basically saying “why is this thing we’re all working so hard to prevent not happening enough to justify prevention?”.
    - bugglebeetle 3y ago
      I’m not sure what’s been addressed? All the interventions beside vaccination have been taken apart and we’re on track to kill 200K people this year. I suppose that’s better than the outset, but would’ve been considered catastrophic for any other disease, prior to COVID. If HIV/AIDS was killing this many people in the US in 2023, it would be considered a national disgrace, for example.
- diogenes4 3y ago
  More like identity politics is why AIDS was completely neglected. With COVID it's clear that capital couldn't stomach the effects treating it properly would have on the labor market. What a ham-handed way to compare two wildly unsimilar scenarios.
pluto_modadic 3y ago
because one caused a moral panic, and one needed people to be moral.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
DelaneyM 3y ago
> …COVID has killed more people in the past 4 years than HIV/AIDS did in the past 40+. Ok, so that’s wrong by an order of magnitude. AIDS has killed ~85.6 million [64.8 million–113.0 million] people, and it’s plausible that could be a huge undercount. COVID has killed ~7M people, which is also bad but nowhere near “more”. There are also a lot of reasons these aren’t really comparable pandemics, and the responses to them are similarly difficult to compare, but I’m not going to bother with that conversation here. [https://www.unaids.org/en/resources/fact-sheet https://www.unaids.org/en/resources/fact-sheet], [https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/ https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/]
- jlmorton 3y ago
  OP was probably referring to the American experience, which is correct. AIDS has killed about 700,000 in the USA, vs 1.1 million Covid deaths.
- bugglebeetle 3y ago
  Apologies, I should’ve clarified that I was referring to the US, where COVID has, in fact, killed more people than HIV/AIDS. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/why-covid-deaths-have-surpassed-aids-deaths-in-the-u-s/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/why-covid-deaths-...
- abeppu 3y ago
  You copied info from that first page incorrectly; 85.6M is their estimate on number of infections and 40.4 million [32.9 million–51.3 million] is their estimate on deaths.
- einpoklum 3y ago
  How does the WorldMeters site reach the covid 7M figure? I know that deciding how to attribute deaths to covid is not that trivial (e.g. as opposed to deaths with covid; or people who did not get tested, i.e. unconfirmed deaths etc.)
- graeme 3y ago
  As abeppu points out, this is their death estimate: 40.4 million [32.9 million–51.3 million] is their estimate on deaths. Further, covid deaths are severely undercounted. Our world in data reports 26 million excess deaths to date, about 5 million in the past year. That's with three years of data, vs. three decades for HIV. There's surely some HIV undercount too, but it's a reasonable bet that covid will exceed HIV in terms of deaths long run.
abeppu 3y ago
> My childhood was filled with warnings and media depicting the tragedy of HIV/AIDS, the surrounding bigotry, and the history of this pandemic still has some cache ... but for years, the HIV/AIDS crisis _was_ ignored, or even laughed at by critical people in government. When you say your childhood was filled with warnings about the tragedy of HIV/AIDS, I think you must be talking about the early 90s, a decade after the crisis got started? I think the fairer comparison will be to however we talk about COVID in the 2030s. https://www.history.com/news/aids-epidemic-ronald-reagan https://www.history.com/news/aids-epidemic-ronald-reagan
- bugglebeetle 3y ago
  While this is correct, my point was that the experience of the HIV/AIDS seemingly had no impact on our handling of COVID. But Reagan/AIDS, Trump/COVID, is a pretty bleak manifestation of “first as tragedy, then as a farce.”
  - bigbillheck 3y ago
    Trump's covid response had some problems, especially early on, but it was infinitely better than Reagan's AIDS response.
  - abeppu 3y ago
    I guess, how did you want the HIV/AIDS experience to inform the COVID response? I don't want to defend Trump and his bleach-injection suggestions etc, but we did: - develop vaccines at a really rapid pace (it's too bad they aren't more effective) - learn a lot about how to treat COVID - shut down broad categories of activity which would have contributed to spread - gave everyone free vaccines and tests (I think this is the only 'free for everyone' health care I've seen in my life) Trump _wasn't_ able to ignore the crisis the way Reagan did for years. But we landed at a place where the vaccines help but don't offer good immunity from infection, and where many people are more comfortable getting infected repeatedly than they are cutting out shared space and public events. It's not clear to me what lessons we're supposed to draw from the HIV/AIDS experience now. Do you think that a generation of people should have fastidious habits around mask use? By contrast, with HIV/AIDS, 'taking it seriously' in the 90s meant doing research, and messaging about being paranoid about sex and drugs. Most people did not need to disrupt their lives. And frankly, they could watch a TV special about the crisis, victim-blame quietly, and cheaply virtue-signal by talking about how important it all was. But if slowing down HIV/AIDS transmission had required that most people inconvenience themselves, or behave differently for even a week, I think the story would have been very different.
gwbas1c 3y ago
With COVID, pretty much everyone would get it just by going about their normal day-to-day life. It effected everyone. In contrast, many people in the US lead a lifestyle that puts them at almost no risk for AIDS. Furthermore, a large majority / plurality of Americans are Christians where the religion actively encourages monogamy. (And this is my opinion,) the large group of people who practice monogamy consider the lifestyle so easy that "oh, we should just encourage monogamy as a solution" is a snap judgement with a clear lack of empathy for people who aren't monogamous. (I should point out that even though I am monogamous, I've had circles of friends that are very promiscuous. Each group has a lot of trouble empathizing with the other lifestyle. I had a lot of ridicule in college and at Burning Man for not being promiscuous; and both my father and grandfather encountered the same thing in the US Navy.) So, it's taken awhile for the monogamous majority / plurality to really understand that the solution for the AIDS crisis isn't to just promote monogamy. One example is very clear in George W. Bush's memoir. Even though he is conservative, Christian, (and I assume monogamous,) his stated goal in his presidency was to solve the AIDS crisis; and he implied that purely teaching monogamy wasn't going to work. He had a lot of regret that incidents in his presidency took his focus away from the AIDS crisis.

tristor 3y ago

I've noticed the same thing, and I'm pretty sure it's because COVID no longer features as part of identity politics. It's the identity politics that drove the AIDS discussion, and it's been the identify politics that drove the COVID discussion. Now that has passed, COVID is no longer a topic people care to discuss regularly, while AIDS is still a forefront topic.

bugglebeetle 3y ago
While this may be true to an extent, it doesn’t address why fighting AIDS outside the context of its impact on the LGBTQ community, e.g. in the developing world, still figures so prominently in American culture and public policy. I expect that the real reason is actually something more sinister, where the politics of the US have devolved to a point where almost everyone will accept the “they deserved it” narrative that was used to vilify those with HIV/AIDS, whether it be of the “they’re were old/fat/weak” or “unvaccinated” variety.
- DelaneyM 3y ago
  Or possibly it’s like the hole in the ozone layer, which has also faded from public discourse, because thanks to that huge amount of press and action it’s been largely addressed. You’re basically saying “why is this thing we’re all working so hard to prevent not happening enough to justify prevention?”.
  - bugglebeetle 3y ago
    I’m not sure what’s been addressed? All the interventions beside vaccination have been taken apart and we’re on track to kill 200K people this year. I suppose that’s better than the outset, but would’ve been considered catastrophic for any other disease, prior to COVID. If HIV/AIDS was killing this many people in the US in 2023, it would be considered a national disgrace, for example.
diogenes4 3y ago
More like identity politics is why AIDS was completely neglected. With COVID it's clear that capital couldn't stomach the effects treating it properly would have on the labor market. What a ham-handed way to compare two wildly unsimilar scenarios.

pluto_modadic 3y ago

because one caused a moral panic, and one needed people to be moral.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

DelaneyM 3y ago

> …COVID has killed more people in the past 4 years than HIV/AIDS did in the past 40+. Ok, so that’s wrong by an order of magnitude. AIDS has killed ~85.6 million [64.8 million–113.0 million] people, and it’s plausible that could be a huge undercount. COVID has killed ~7M people, which is also bad but nowhere near “more”. There are also a lot of reasons these aren’t really comparable pandemics, and the responses to them are similarly difficult to compare, but I’m not going to bother with that conversation here. [https://www.unaids.org/en/resources/fact-sheet https://www.unaids.org/en/resources/fact-sheet], [https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/ https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/]

jlmorton 3y ago
OP was probably referring to the American experience, which is correct. AIDS has killed about 700,000 in the USA, vs 1.1 million Covid deaths.
bugglebeetle 3y ago
Apologies, I should’ve clarified that I was referring to the US, where COVID has, in fact, killed more people than HIV/AIDS. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/why-covid-deaths-have-surpassed-aids-deaths-in-the-u-s/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/why-covid-deaths-...
abeppu 3y ago
You copied info from that first page incorrectly; 85.6M is their estimate on number of infections and 40.4 million [32.9 million–51.3 million] is their estimate on deaths.
einpoklum 3y ago
How does the WorldMeters site reach the covid 7M figure? I know that deciding how to attribute deaths to covid is not that trivial (e.g. as opposed to deaths with covid; or people who did not get tested, i.e. unconfirmed deaths etc.)
graeme 3y ago
As abeppu points out, this is their death estimate: 40.4 million [32.9 million–51.3 million] is their estimate on deaths. Further, covid deaths are severely undercounted. Our world in data reports 26 million excess deaths to date, about 5 million in the past year. That's with three years of data, vs. three decades for HIV. There's surely some HIV undercount too, but it's a reasonable bet that covid will exceed HIV in terms of deaths long run.

abeppu 3y ago

> My childhood was filled with warnings and media depicting the tragedy of HIV/AIDS, the surrounding bigotry, and the history of this pandemic still has some cache ... but for years, the HIV/AIDS crisis _was_ ignored, or even laughed at by critical people in government. When you say your childhood was filled with warnings about the tragedy of HIV/AIDS, I think you must be talking about the early 90s, a decade after the crisis got started? I think the fairer comparison will be to however we talk about COVID in the 2030s. https://www.history.com/news/aids-epidemic-ronald-reagan https://www.history.com/news/aids-epidemic-ronald-reagan

bugglebeetle 3y ago
While this is correct, my point was that the experience of the HIV/AIDS seemingly had no impact on our handling of COVID. But Reagan/AIDS, Trump/COVID, is a pretty bleak manifestation of “first as tragedy, then as a farce.”
- bigbillheck 3y ago
  Trump's covid response had some problems, especially early on, but it was infinitely better than Reagan's AIDS response.
- abeppu 3y ago
  I guess, how did you want the HIV/AIDS experience to inform the COVID response? I don't want to defend Trump and his bleach-injection suggestions etc, but we did: - develop vaccines at a really rapid pace (it's too bad they aren't more effective) - learn a lot about how to treat COVID - shut down broad categories of activity which would have contributed to spread - gave everyone free vaccines and tests (I think this is the only 'free for everyone' health care I've seen in my life) Trump _wasn't_ able to ignore the crisis the way Reagan did for years. But we landed at a place where the vaccines help but don't offer good immunity from infection, and where many people are more comfortable getting infected repeatedly than they are cutting out shared space and public events. It's not clear to me what lessons we're supposed to draw from the HIV/AIDS experience now. Do you think that a generation of people should have fastidious habits around mask use? By contrast, with HIV/AIDS, 'taking it seriously' in the 90s meant doing research, and messaging about being paranoid about sex and drugs. Most people did not need to disrupt their lives. And frankly, they could watch a TV special about the crisis, victim-blame quietly, and cheaply virtue-signal by talking about how important it all was. But if slowing down HIV/AIDS transmission had required that most people inconvenience themselves, or behave differently for even a week, I think the story would have been very different.

gwbas1c 3y ago

With COVID, pretty much everyone would get it just by going about their normal day-to-day life. It effected everyone. In contrast, many people in the US lead a lifestyle that puts them at almost no risk for AIDS. Furthermore, a large majority / plurality of Americans are Christians where the religion actively encourages monogamy. (And this is my opinion,) the large group of people who practice monogamy consider the lifestyle so easy that "oh, we should just encourage monogamy as a solution" is a snap judgement with a clear lack of empathy for people who aren't monogamous. (I should point out that even though I am monogamous, I've had circles of friends that are very promiscuous. Each group has a lot of trouble empathizing with the other lifestyle. I had a lot of ridicule in college and at Burning Man for not being promiscuous; and both my father and grandfather encountered the same thing in the US Navy.) So, it's taken awhile for the monogamous majority / plurality to really understand that the solution for the AIDS crisis isn't to just promote monogamy. One example is very clear in George W. Bush's memoir. Even though he is conservative, Christian, (and I assume monogamous,) his stated goal in his presidency was to solve the AIDS crisis; and he implied that purely teaching monogamy wasn't going to work. He had a lot of regret that incidents in his presidency took his focus away from the AIDS crisis.