Coronavirus vs HIV

[Puppylucky]

This is not trying to start a bun fight, but being old enough to remember HIV in its ferocious initial effect I think has really given me a different perspective on Covid. At 20 I was presented with information and a govt campaign that told me that the most basic instinct of life was fatal and I watched cultural icons die in a horrible and stigmatised way. But life continued. We took the risks that the young do and life was a bleaker for a while (read Rupert Everett's first autobiography for details) but eventually things changed for the better and HIV positive is no longer a death sentence.
Fast forward 30 years and the world has shut down over a virus with a much lower death rate. Seriously what am I missing?

Actually a family member who works in Pharma said to me that while we’re all hoping for an effective Covid vaccine, he thought it would be more likely that it would echo the hunt for HIV treatment - we would end up with a suite of treatments to manage it, rather than a silver bullet

Your family member should know that the two are totally different.
There has never been an immune response which has cleared HIV from the body. Therefore there are no effective antibodies.
Covid can be cleared and therefore the immune system can be stimulated to produce antibodies (however short lived they are). T cells are also produced which will help fight any future infection

@Puppylucky

Unfortunately most of you are missing the point. Originally HIV was believed to be air and contact borne - any one remember what a big deal it was when Princess Diana shook hands with an HIV victim? Any one remember the boy who was excluded from school because he was HIV positive via a blood transplant? In the early days people were totally hysterical about how (and how easily) HIV could be transmitted. All you armchair medics do your reading! .

But there was nowhere near the number of deaths, was there?

If only a thousand people died of coronavirus in the first 6 months of the year, we wouldn't have had a lockdown. But there were 1000 deaths a day in April.

I agree OP.
If it was HIV today Doris would shut down all the dating sites, pubs and make it illegal to have sex ever again.

Also if that child did have covid19, Diana would have caught it. And people are, everywhere. With hiv that didn't happen.

Puppylove I was 8 when HIV was first about. I don't remember the talk that it was airborne. If anything I remember it becoming something people associated with the gay community and straight people didn't take it seriously at all. I remember the fear when straight people started getting it but I don't remember the conversation that it was airborne. Mu overriding memory is the advertising campaign saying you can't tell if someone has it just by looking. It terrified me.

@Puppylucky

Unfortunately most of you are missing the point. Originally HIV was believed to be air and contact borne - any one remember what a big deal it was when Princess Diana shook hands with an HIV victim? Any one remember the boy who was excluded from school because he was HIV positive via a blood transplant? In the early days people were totally hysterical about how (and how easily) HIV could be transmitted. All you armchair medics do your reading! .

No, it really wasn’t thought to be airborne or transmissible by contact. Not by medics or scientists, anyway. I was in my early twenties and I don’t recall any doubt about the fact it was transmitted primarily between gay men and drug users, therefore it was blood & body fluid borne.

There may have been tabloid scaremongering and plenty of ignorance and bigotry...

HIV was not ferocious in it’s initial effects. The worry was that no one actually knew what the prognosis was or how fast it might spread. For example, could it be spread by normal social contact or drinking from an infected unwashed tea cup. In the event we found that it does not spread very easily and simple precautions will prevent it.

My brother was infected with HIV as a child and I remember vividly that we were to tell no one about it, as the misinformation about the way it was transmitted was rife! People thought it could be contacted through sharing bathrooms or kitchen utensils. There is no way friends would have been allowed over to play had people found out!

I think the pp that mentioned the treatment of covid meant that in the early days of HIV treatment, the cure was often worse than the illness, and many people died because of the treatment. Who knows what the long term effects of covid treatment will have on patients.

The point I'm really trying to make is not whether or not original assumptions about how it was contracted were correct, but more the fact that this was seen as a fatal disease that any one could catch (the 'gay disease' tag was both homophobic and quickly proved wrong) and that transmission methods were unclear for a while, but we didn't dissolve into a pit of hysteria!

All you armchair medics do your reading

OP can you link me to some info you've read about the scientific community thinking HIV could be airborne? I remember Diana shaking the mans hand and even I as quite a young person then knew how HIV was transmitted.

The scientific community had appeared out all possible routes of transmission for HIV by 1982, long before it became a worldwide pandemic.

Unfortunately most of you are missing the point.

I don't wish to sound like I am blaming any one for contracting HIV and I know that sex is necessary for the continuation of the species, but if Covid was sexually transmitted, I'd be more than happy to be celibate for the rest of my days in return for all other social interaction to be able to safely resume.

@cinammonbuns

‘the most basic human instinct’. I guess I’m the only one who likes to breathe, drink and eat..

😁😂

@emptyshelvesagain

Unfortunately most of you are missing the point.

😛😁

I remember the public information films on TV with a large black tomb stone at the end.

My friend's brother died of AID's from infected blood due to having haemophilia, he licked a coin and placed it on my forehead, almost wet myself as I thought I may have been infected with the virus.

39 Million people have died of AID's so far.

Covid 19 has barely seen a week's of the World's normal deaths.

This is why I will continue to live my life as normal as currently possible and not hide away.

They are totally incomparable and anybody with half a brain cell and bothered to actually listen knew from the outset how HIV was transmitted . I also was young in those times and was never concerned about getting HIV .

The scientific community didn’t believe HIV was airborne but it didn’t stop reputable newspapers from printing it.

The scientific community realised quite quickly that it was being passed via seminal fluid, yet it took years of campaigning and fundraising to get their fledgling research to be taken seriously- because there “weren’t that many deaths per capita, so why should we worry?”

The two pathogens/viruses/whatever are very different. But people’s attitudes are the same. The media is the same. The people in power are treating it the same (by largely ignoring it while filling their pockets).

We have learned nothing of how to conduct ourselves to our collective best interests in the 40 years since the AIDS crisis.

Deaths from Covid are far greater than deaths from AIDS. Also, we know for a fact that Covid is airborne due to science and technology. I had a conversation with my mum last week and I said how Covid is like AIDS, only on a much larger and worse scale.

@Puppylucky

The point I'm really trying to make is not whether or not original assumptions about how it was contracted were correct, but more the fact that this was seen as a fatal disease that any one could catch (the 'gay disease' tag was both homophobic and quickly proved wrong) and that transmission methods were unclear for a while, but we didn't dissolve into a pit of hysteria!

This isn’t true though. It was seen as a disease that anyone who injected drugs or who didn’t practise safe sex could catch.

No-one with any understanding of the disease thought it was airborne or passed via casual contact. I don’t know why you keep saying that.

Also, I think you’ll find that the gay community were very afraid, and with good reason. Not because they didn’t know how it was spread, but because they didn’t know whether they or their lovers already had it.

I'm 46 so I remember "the don't die of ignorance campaign " and whilst there was fear and misinformation ,it didn't shut schools down and work places ,we didn't have to wear facemask ,s whilst shopping in the very early days people worried they might catch it from sharing cups , utensils etc ,but most people were educated enough to realise how to protect themselves from it.

Before more effective treatments were developed in the 90s, HIV was a death sentence, even someone for otherwise healthy, in their 20s.

Now if someone in their 20s gets COVID, statistically they have a very good chance of surviving it.

@Longtalljosie lol what does your relative in Pharma do, keep the reception desk? Clearly nothing that involves even the most basic understanding of viruses.

@Porcupineinwaiting the only comparison he was making was that it was likely to turn into a condition to be managed, rather than a single silver bullet / cure. Of course he wasn’t claiming the two conditions were the same. I must admit, I’d assumed that was so obvious it didn’t need saying.

[quote Porcupineinwaiting]@Longtalljosie lol what does your relative in Pharma do, keep the reception desk? Clearly nothing that involves even the most basic understanding of viruses.[/quote]

Also we didn't need a vaccine to avoid hiv. A vaccine is pretty much the only way we can avoid covid19.