I always try to use HIV as my point of reference for COVID-19. We got off lucky by that measure. So maybe my pessimism is unfounded, but I really wish we had learned more lessons from HIV.
From what I understand, HIV is fairly difficult to transmit, requiring an exchange of infected body fluids. This makes it deeply traumatic because the people you're most likely to infect will be people extremely close to you. To some extent this is true of almost any transmissable disease, but HIV added the twist that infection is very, very unlikely to happen between two individuals that are not physically intimate with each other.
In this sense, HIV doesn't seem like a particularly good model for anything like a coronavirus pandemic. Aerosol transmission just totally changes almost every aspect of the resulting pandemic.
I’m not who you’re asking but I wish we had learned that a robust debate is necessary and we shouldn’t just assume tha Anthony Fauci has read the latest research.
He did enormous damage in 1983 by speculating about casual transmission of HIV within households even though he admitted to not having read the paper. He was slow to get up to speed on aerosol transmission this time around.
The comment at the bottom of that page also contains this gem from Oprah Winfrey in 1987:
> Research studies now project that one in five—listen to me, hard to believe—one in five heterosexuals could be dead from AIDS at the end of the next three years. That’s by 1990. One in five. It is no longer just a gay disease. Believe me.
Obviously that never happened.
I was 12 that year and this sort of stuff terrorized us, even though it was based on highly dubious modeling, plus belief by public health officials in the promulgation of nobel lies.
I think we should have learned that groupthink and motivated reasoning can lead to all sorts of ancillary damage not just to psychological health, but to reduced trust in institutions, heightened political polarization, massive misallocation of resources, and putting focus on the wrong places.
We should have learned that being honest about what is known and what isn’t known and placing trust in the public leads to the public placing trust in public health authorities when it really matters. Credibility is extremely important to maintain, and protecting and encouraging a robust debate is paramount to discovering the truth and making better decisions.
> From what I understand, HIV is fairly difficult to transmit, requiring an exchange of infected body fluids.
Fauci didn't think so in 1983.
"But if ''nonsexual, non-blood-borne transmission is possible, the scope of the syndrome may be enormous,'' writes Dr. Fauci of the National Institutes of Health in an editorial to be published Friday in the Journal of the American Medical Association."
PaulDavisThe1st|4 years ago
In this sense, HIV doesn't seem like a particularly good model for anything like a coronavirus pandemic. Aerosol transmission just totally changes almost every aspect of the resulting pandemic.
What lessons do you wish we had learned from HIV?
krrrh|4 years ago
https://www.econlib.org/great-moments-in-epidemiology/
He did enormous damage in 1983 by speculating about casual transmission of HIV within households even though he admitted to not having read the paper. He was slow to get up to speed on aerosol transmission this time around.
The comment at the bottom of that page also contains this gem from Oprah Winfrey in 1987:
> Research studies now project that one in five—listen to me, hard to believe—one in five heterosexuals could be dead from AIDS at the end of the next three years. That’s by 1990. One in five. It is no longer just a gay disease. Believe me.
Obviously that never happened. I was 12 that year and this sort of stuff terrorized us, even though it was based on highly dubious modeling, plus belief by public health officials in the promulgation of nobel lies.
I think we should have learned that groupthink and motivated reasoning can lead to all sorts of ancillary damage not just to psychological health, but to reduced trust in institutions, heightened political polarization, massive misallocation of resources, and putting focus on the wrong places.
We should have learned that being honest about what is known and what isn’t known and placing trust in the public leads to the public placing trust in public health authorities when it really matters. Credibility is extremely important to maintain, and protecting and encouraging a robust debate is paramount to discovering the truth and making better decisions.
mulvya|4 years ago
Fauci didn't think so in 1983.
"But if ''nonsexual, non-blood-borne transmission is possible, the scope of the syndrome may be enormous,'' writes Dr. Fauci of the National Institutes of Health in an editorial to be published Friday in the Journal of the American Medical Association."
https://www.nytimes.com/1983/05/06/us/family-contact-studied...