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A doctor on Trump’s team just compared the Coronavirus pandemic to the HIV epidemic. I’m sure there are older gentlemen here who remember what happened during those early days of the HIV crisis. Care to share?

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I’m not sure if the intent of the question was a clinical comparison or more general.

 

I can’t speak to the clinical similarity but I remember the days of fear, confusion and desperate frustration at an indifferent Reagan administration. My very first ever boy crush died of AIDS. It seems like a long, long time ago.

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The primary difference to me is that in the early years of AIDS, we didn't know what was causing it or how it was transmitted. I had acquaintances who died of unusual illnesses which at first didn't even seem clearly related to one another. One of them was a gay doctor who got bizarre symptoms for which he tried to treat himself; he died in 1980, and it wasn't until a couple of years later that we began to connect the dots. By the time another acquaintance died early in 1982, there were rumors going around about a "gay cancer." It wasn't until 1985 that we had a definitive answer about what was really going on.

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The primary difference to me is that in the early years of AIDS, we didn't know what was causing it or how it was transmitted. I had acquaintances who died of unusual illnesses which at first didn't even seem clearly related to one another. One of them was a gay doctor who got bizarre symptoms for which he tried to treat himself; he died in 1980, and it wasn't until a couple of years later that we began to connect the dots. By the time another acquaintance died early in 1982, there were rumors going around about a "gay cancer." It wasn't until 1985 that we had a definitive answer about what was really going on.

 

There's a legacy to all that. I've posted this article in several other threads. But it's good news, and one big reason to feel hopeful amidst a gathering storm. All the hard work and dead ends and deaths of that time did result in advances and drugs that have already saved lives in this outbreak.

 

Optimism grows that drugs from past outbreaks may treat coronavirus

Drugs developed in the past to treat malaria, AIDS and other respiratory syndromes are showing promise against coronavirus.

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I’m not sure if the intent of the question was a clinical comparison or more general.

 

 

I’m more interested in the public reaction to it. Was there hysteria around it like what’s happening right now?

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I was trained as a virologist. HIV is only a BSL (Biosafety level) 2.5 virus, whereas this COVID 19 is a BSL 3.5 virus. (The highest possible BLS is 4). The scary thing about this thing compared to HIV is that this one can be transmitted via air.

 

What virus was a BLS 4? Does HIV have a lower BLS level because it never became airborne?

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The primary difference to me is that in the early years of AIDS, we didn't know what was causing it or how it was transmitted. I had acquaintances who died of unusual illnesses which at first didn't even seem clearly related to one another. One of them was a gay doctor who got bizarre symptoms for which he tried to treat himself; he died in 1980, and it wasn't until a couple of years later that we began to connect the dots. By the time another acquaintance died early in 1982, there were rumors going around about a "gay cancer." It wasn't until 1985 that we had a definitive answer about what was really going on.

 

First time I heard about it was from a friend in college. It didn’t even have a name back then. My friend said there was a disease spreading in the States that was so contagious you can get it from touching a doorknob an infected person touched.

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I’m more interested in the public reaction to it. Was there hysteria around it like what’s happening right now?

 

We'll all have lots of time. So one book to read or movie to watch is, "And the Band Played On." If you haven't already.

 

I can't speak from personal experience like @Charlie or others. But I thought that book was a masterpiece. It captured many of the emotions that are playing out now. I think everything that we need to know about how we get through this, both individually and collectively, is in that book. Different century. But much of the shit is the same.

 

I see the book as part tragedy and part hope.

 

The tragedy part is playing out right now, except much faster and globally. To paint it in intentionally simplistic terms, it was a war between emotion and denial on the one hand, and science on the other. Lots of people died in the process.

 

The scientists ended up being mostly right, and finding out what caused it and how to treat it. We still haven't figured out how to eradicate it. But we can control it, and live with it. That's probably the most likely outcome with COVID-19 and the family of similar viruses. That's the hope part.

 

I hope this doesn't offend anyone who was there when it all happened. I was not out at the time. So I could read the book more as objective history than as personal trauma. I know people who had whole networks of friends wiped out.

 

What was very poignant to me was the anguish and denial in the Gay community. There was a sense that we finally are able to live the kind of life we want, more or less openly. And now we are being suppressed again, and told we can't go to bathhouses because they have to be shut down.

 

That's the stage we are in right now. It must be even more frustrating for people who aren't used to having to live in the shadows, or hide certain behaviors. You mean I can't get on a plane, or go to a bar, or a pool party? Fuck that nonsense! Many people right now are just clearly ignoring the warnings for voluntary compliance being made by Mayors and Governors. Spain is already using the police-operated drones that China used, to warn people wandering around in public to go back home.

 

And some people will worry too much, or even panic. Which right now is probably a good response. It is probably better to be safer, and not sorry a month from now. This is like AIDS, but played out about 100 times quicker. The good part of that is that with AIDS it took a long time to know how to protect ourselves, let alone be treated if we got sick. Two months into this, we know a huge amount already.

 

I'm not trying to make out any part of the Gay community to be the villain. But there were people who thought the government was just full of shit. Just like right now there are people taking the position that this is all one massive overreaction.

 

As has been noted already, there was another part of the Gay community fighting for their lives and demanding the government act big, and act now. I say this as a matter of fact rather than as a partisan statement. Nancy Pelosi was right in the middle of that, with the Ryan White Act. So we can be thankful, I think, that we have leaders that have been there and done this before. Dr. Fauci is another one. Every time I see a picture of him or read something he says, I feel a little comforted.

 

Randy Shilts, the book's author, died of AIDS. The fact that he is seen by some as a Betty Friedan of the LGBTQ+ movement and by others as controversial, or just wrong, speaks to the depth of emotion and differences of opinion when a crisis like this hits. Some of you know Lucky. I once got into a discussion with him about Shilts. Having lived through it all, it took him about 10 seconds to go from 0 to 10. So I just dropped the subject.

 

This may not be the time to say this, but I think the legacy of COVID-19 will be very much the same as AIDS. There will be elements of panic, like there are right now. But the word that probably best sums up where we will end up when the cloud lifts is this: purpose. That's an optimistic view. But I'm an optimist.

 

AIDS united the LGBTQ community and organized it, for its own survival. It also humanized us to the rest of the world. That laid the groundwork for everything that came after, I think. Including same sex marriage.

 

The silver lining in this dark cloud is that it is almost certainly going to do the same thing. When this passes, there will be other global pandemics and other global challenges we face. I think we will have a deeper sense of purpose in doing so.

Edited by stevenkesslar
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HIV is typically handled in BSL-3 labs. The fact that it is not airborne is one of the factors that lower its BSL level. Examples of BSL-4 viruses: Ebola, Marburg, Lassa viruses, and Crimean-Congo Hemorrhagic Fever. These are nuclear bomb level bio agents and you don't want to be anywhere close to.

 

 

What virus was a BLS 4? Does HIV have a lower BLS level because it never became airborne?
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As I have written elsewhere, I worked at St Vincent's Hospital in Greenwich Village at a time, late 1970s) when the AID epidemic would be measured in the hundreds of people with Gay Bowel Disease and GRID (Gay related Immunodeficiency). The panic was there for health care workers and gay men and their friends but mostly life went on as it always had even as the wards in St Vincent's filled up. It took several years to figure out the nature of the disease, the cause and eventually a treatment. Most statistics date the epidemic to 1981 though there are rare case reports of cases going back to the 1960s 1988 and 1989 were years of a large number of HIV related deaths, although globally 2004 was the peak year.

 

Still, worldwide, even now, yearly more than 600,000 people die of AIDs related illness, the majority, more than 80%, in Africa, So, more than 40 years down the road, and that particular epidemic is still ongoing.

To expect a simple end to this particular virus, coronavirus, is probably foolhardy. Immunity conferred is not complete and not long lasting. We will get better at diagnosing it. We will get better at treating it. We may even get to a point where there is a somewhat effective vaccine. This virus also may mutate to a less toxic form. But all of those things will take time.

The world is a completely different place than it was when that first case occurred in Wuhan. It will never be the same again. But more than likely, advances will make it seem not so bad, just at the 1/2 million deaths a years from AIDS seems to be not so bad,

 

 

AIDS Death in 2018

According to the WHO, 32 million people have died of HIV since the beginning of the epidemic out of the 74.9 million who have been infected (roughly 43 percent).1 Moreover, of the 37.9 million people living with HIV today, just over 770,000 died in 2018.

 

All told, AIDS-related deaths have been reduced by more than 56 percent since the peak in 2004.2

Edited by purplekow
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HIV is typically handled in BSL-3 labs. The fact that it is not airborne is one of the factors that lower its BSL level. Examples of BSL-4 viruses: Ebola, Marburg, Lassa viruses, and Crimean-Congo Hemorrhagic Fever. These are nuclear bomb level bio agents and you don't want to be anywhere close to.

This is fascinating. Are plague and Spanish flu, small pox handled in BSL-4 labs? I think I saw a documentary about a CDC lab where the location is highly secured because of the type of specimens that are stored there.

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This is fascinating. Are plague and Spanish flu, small pox handled in BSL-4 labs? I think I saw a documentary about a CDC lab where the location is highly secured because of the type of specimens that are stored there.

I looked it up on Wikipedia: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biosafety_level

 

Looks like there is a BSL -4 lab for extraterrestrial specimens. So interesting...

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The world is a completely different place than it was when that first case occurred in Wuhan. It will never be the same again. But more than likely, advances will make it seem not so bad, just at the 1/2 million deaths a years from AIDS seems to be not so bad,

 

I think what used to be so panic-inducing about AIDS was that it was a death sentence. And often enough it was a death sentence for the young, the beautiful, the talented, the artists, the people in the prime of life.

 

Now it is something that allows people to feel they can mostly live a "normal" life. And as this virus is proving, nobody really knows what a "normal" life is. You could live to be 100, or die in some freak accident tomorrow. We're all one diagnosis away from having something like cancer, that could kill us. Life goes on.

 

Your personal observations are eloquent. The standard is probably not to eradicate this. It is to figure out how we get back to a new normal.

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Another major difference between AIDS and COVID-19 is that from the beginning, it was clear that only certain kinds of people who engaged in certain kinds of disreputable behaviors were affected by AIDS. It was easy for Reagan and his administration to avoid dealing aggressively with the disease, or even mentioning its existence, because those kinds of people and those behaviors weren't associated in the public mind with the people who supported him. COVID-19 doesn't discriminate on the basis of political ideology, religious identification, or sexual orientation: anyone can get it, by engaging in the most common activities of daily life. There wasn't much panic over AIDS among the general public once it was clear that most of them weren't at risk; they had to be persuaded into feeling sympathy for the initial victims. It wasn't until heterosexual women, men who didn't use drugs, and babies were affected that compassion for those with AIDS became generally respectable. Many people like to ignore that uncomfortable fact now, but I ran an AIDS Hotline as a volunteer from 1986 to 1989, and I know who was calling with concern and who wasn't.

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This is fascinating. Are plague and Spanish flu, small pox handled in BSL-4 labs? I think I saw a documentary about a CDC lab where the location is highly secured because of the type of specimens that are stored there.

 

https://www.msnbc.com/onassignment

 

There was an interesting one hour On Assignment on this. 99 % of the info I get is reading, not TV. But this adds some very interesting visual images. Including what it's like to work in one of these highly secure labs where really lethal viruses are kept and researched. Those moon space suits look less complicated. Just imagine all the medical professionals and scientists who get to dress like this when they go to work everyday.

 

If you click on the link above the top episode link as of today should be titled:

Outbreak - March 8, 2020

 

The show is sliced into segments, but the one where they literally walk you into a highly secure lab where they keep the virus is this one:

 

Outbreak: We've been here before

 

If you click on that it should take you to a 7:53 segment, partly filmed inside one of these labs. The scientist interviewed in Danielle Anderson.

 

She's interviewed in several segments of this episode. At one point they are in a cage with a bat, and she basically suggests that eradication is not really an option at this point. The horse is out of the barn, Or perhaps we should say the bat is out of the cave. So we're going to have to live with it, until there is a vaccine.

 

A few weeks ago, or even a week ago, that did not seem so obvious. Now it does.

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Another major difference between AIDS and COVID-19 is that from the beginning, it was clear that only certain kinds of people who engaged in certain kinds of disreputable behaviors were affected by AIDS. It was easy for Reagan and his administration to avoid dealing aggressively with the disease, or even mentioning its existence, because those kinds of people and those behaviors weren't associated in the public mind with the people who supported him. COVID-19 doesn't discriminate on the basis of political ideology, religious identification, or sexual orientation: anyone can get it, by engaging in the most common activities of daily life. There wasn't much panic over AIDS among the general public once it was clear that most of them weren't at risk; they had to be persuaded into feeling sympathy for the initial victims. It wasn't until heterosexual women, men who didn't use drugs, and babies were affected that compassion for those with AIDS became generally respectable. Many people like to ignore that uncomfortable fact now, but I ran an AIDS Hotline as a volunteer from 1986 to 1989, and I know who was calling with concern and who wasn't.

 

Very true and sad about HIV and the right wing agenda. COVID-19 has brought about a lot of anti Asian and anti Asian American racism. True is wasn't until "innocent" people or famous people were affected and died from HIV that we go more awareness.

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I’m more interested in the public reaction to it. Was there hysteria around it like what’s happening right now?

 

 

Not among the general population. Their attitude, even for those whose hearts were in the right place, was that it was a "gay" disease. But among gay men, in the early 80s, it was terrifying

What virus was a BLS 4? Does HIV have a lower BLS level because it never became airborne?

HIV is not very infectious. It is relatively fragile and doesn't survive long in ambient conditions. Even though it isn't very infectious, it is extremely virulent-it kills its host almost 100% of the time.

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I’m more interested in the public reaction to it. Was there hysteria around it like what’s happening right now?
There was a lot of fear since for a long time it was unclear how HIV was spread. Even after the modes of transmission were clearly established, some people in positions of authority continued to spread misinformation and promote hysteria. William Dannemeyer, a Republican congressman from Orange County CA, supported a ballot initiative submitted by Lyndon LaRouche which would have quarantined HIV+ people. Lorraine Day was an orthopedic surgeon at UCSF who promoted unsubstantiated claims about the risks to doctors when performing surgery on HIV+ people. She also promoted fake cures for cancer. It turns out Dannemeyer and Day were soulmates (both were Holocaust deniers) and they spent years of wedded bliss together until Dannemeyer relocated to hell last year.
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  • 1 month later...

With so much time and nothing to do, yesterday I decided to start cleaning out my files and getting rid of things I don't need to keep, like insurance policies on houses and cars that expired years ago. I found an envelope about a catered milestone birthday party that we gave in Philadelphia in March 1983. Along with the menu and the bill from the caterer, I found the list of three dozen gay friends we had invited. Looking through the names, I realized that some of them must have come to the party already carrying HIV in their bodies (the virus hadn't been identified yet, and AIDS still didn't have its name), because over the next several years, more than a third of the men on the list developed AIDS, and all but one of them died. There was no social distancing in our small house, but it didn't matter, because the guests couldn't have spread the virus through friendly social contact, as we later learned from infectious disease specialists. Some ignorant people feared any contact with those who were HIV+ but most of us rallied around them.

 

Yesterday, our neighbors asked if we would like to come to dinner one night this week. Like us, they have been self-isolating for the past month and are as tired of eating alone every night as we are. They are good friends, and we have eaten often at their home. Yet I hesitated and debated about saying yes. During the AIDS epidemic, scientific knowledge encouraged people to come together, and the gay community developed more social solidarity than it ever had before. In the novel coronavirus epidemic, scientific knowledge encourages us to avoid one another socially. Psychologically, I am finding sensible behavior much harder to maintain in this epidemic than in the first one.

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