- It is hard to do justice to the more than 100,000 people in the U.S who died from a drug overdose last year (a 30% increase from the previous year) and the hundreds of thousands who have died from HIV and SARS-CoV-2.
- It is significant and worrying to see four decades of such grief compressed into less than two years.
- Those most affected were marginalized people who had long built solidarity among themselves.
- A different dynamic is developing with COVID in the U.S. While the same kinds of people are most vulnerable to COVID as to HIV, a not-entirely-incorrect perception among rich people is that they, too, are susceptible to COVID.
In late October, the United States reached a sombre milestone: in less than two years, more individuals in the United States had died with COVID-19 than had perished in the four decades of the AIDS pandemic in the United States as reported by Scientific American.
COVID deaths
Nearly 800,000 people are known to have died of COVID-19.
If current trends continue—and they don’t have to—hundreds of thousands of people could die of COVID in the U.S. in 2022, while perhaps 15,000 people living with HIV may die next year of any cause.
These dire numbers are worth comparing and considering, with a few caveats.
Every person who has died in these pandemics is worthy of being known as they lived and loved in their time on this earth.
And yet, this milestone is important in its scale.
I have known so many people for decades who have lost and mourned loved ones to AIDS; I have seen quite intimately the toll this takes on those who have survived the AIDS pandemic since 1981, and how their individual and collective grief has shaped U.S. politics, protest and queer community.
The Comparison
The comparative COVID–AIDS death tolls in the U.S. also beg a comparison of global COVID deaths to global AIDS deaths.
And here, we see something very different.
While COVID deaths are now about 110 % of total AIDS deaths in the U.S., global COVID deaths—about five million and growing—are less than 20 % of the more than 36 million people who have died of AIDS.
The novel coronavirus moves through social networks quickly, can take hold in (and transmit through) people in mere days, and can lead to death in weeks (rather than years).
COVID has already surpassed this total in a tenth of the time.
And yet, that doesn’t explain why COVID has already surpassed total AIDS deaths in the U.S. but is less than a fifth of them globally.
Mass vaccination
What I find perplexing in some ways is that similar to its early access to antiretrovirals, the U.S. had various head starts with SARS-Co-V2 over other countries—more, by some metrics.
The U.S. also had some of the first COVID medicines and vaccines and, after a rocky start, rolled them out rapidly—at one point vaccinating four million people a day.
But it stalled and is currently below number 50 among nations’ vaccination rates.
Yet through it all, the U.S. has continued to have the highest number of total coronavirus infections and coronavirus deaths (and at times, the highest per capita deaths).
Those most affected were marginalized people who had long built solidarity among themselves.
But by the time the U.S. had gotten antiretrovirals in the mid-1990s, HIV was circulating in the Global South not just through anal sex, proximity to prisons and the use of injection drugs but, increasingly, through vaginal sex and vertical transmission, from parent to child.
Susceptibility
A different dynamic is developing with COVID in the U.S. While the same kinds of people are most vulnerable to COVID as to HIV, a not-entirely-incorrect perception among rich people is that they, too, are susceptible to COVID.
For instance, at the height of AIDS deaths in the U.S., gay men overwhelmingly took on new practices to protect one another, even though they were often accused by straight moralists of “bug chasing”—intentionally trying to get HIV, a desire practised by an extremely niche group and one never endorsed by formal gay leaders.
Yet with COVID, bug chasing has been completely normalized and championed by major conservative radio hosts and politicians.
Thinking about the comparative U.S. and global rates of COVID and AIDS also shows the folly in thinking of the United States as a single entity.
But on this World AIDS Day, in addition to remembering the dead and supporting the living who are affected by HIV, let us remember there is no contest between these two pandemics.
Despite the particulars of the two viruses, they affect a similar viral underclass.
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Source: Scientific American
