As we sit pondering this pandemic, we’re all looking for something to compare it to, something that has happened before — and ended — so we can be assured this sense of doom isn’t our dystopian Foreverland.
Meanwhile, I’m struck by the similarities to another frightening virus, and how it was first regarded. Now, unless you are a centenarian, you have no real-life memory of the flu pandemic of 1918. We can only study history to gauge how that time compares to this morning’s depressive shelter-in-place lifestyle.
But many of us can remember when an unknown and mysterious virus started making appearances and how it was whispered about, ignored, denied, and after years, finally acknowledged.
I’m talking about the AIDS crisis. It was back in the early ‘80s, and before it was known as Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV), which caused Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome, it was called GRID, or Gay-Related Immune Deficiency. And it was a death sentence.
It was first ignored by the Reagan administration, even as it began to kill young people, and because its earliest victims were homosexual men and IV drug users, there was both denial and shame associated with it.
Some sufferers were ostracized from their families, some had been closeted before the disease outed them. When movie star Rock Hudson got it, the secret that his real life was vastly different from his reel life, made people stop whispering and start talking.
Still there was shame. With HIV and AIDS, the scourge moved through the communities society has deemed expendable, disproportionately affecting poor, black and brown citizens. Before it became apparent that an exchange of bodily fluids was the way to contract this virus, the fear of casual contact was palpable. And we, society, decided who was an innocent victim — and who got what they deserved. There was plenty of fear, ignorance, and bigotry to go around.
In the similar, but not the same way COVID-19 doesn’t discriminate, the AIDS virus didn’t either.
Your sexual history and your partner’s (or your/their history with recreational drug use) mattered. But it also mattered if you had surgery, or hemophilia, or any procedure that required a blood transfusion. Condoms were freely distributed in many places where people gathered, and they were touted not so much for birth control, as they were life savers.
To learn about AIDS was to learn about all the tangible and intangible things young healthy people lost as they got sicker and died, in the prime of their lives. And, as with coronavirus patients, some died without family around, to comfort them in their final moments of despair.
It took one of the most famous NBA players in the world, Magic Johnson, coming forward in the prime of his career, announcing he was HIV positive, for many of us to stop judging and start to look for solutions. Today you can turn on the television and see advertisements for HIV medication. It’s now described as life-threatening instead of definitively fatal.
It took decades for the tide to turn about HIV and AIDS.
Now compare and contrast that with the coronavirus pandemic.
As with the Reagan administration, the current administration decided to ignore, dismiss and deny there was an issue (despite warnings from our own U.S. intelligence), until it was too late to stop it in its tracks. And while how HIV was contracted was a mystery for awhile, the scientists, virologists and epidemiologists of today were able to, in a matter of months, not years, determine that this virus spread much more easily, quickly and casually than HIV, or MERS, SARS or Ebola, all of which required close contact. No contact was even needed. You could be asymptomatic and still pass it along to family, friends, colleagues and coworkers.
And yet, as with the early years of HIV and AIDS, we have deniers, some of them in top levels of the government, more eager to get the economy going than making sure we are all protected.
As with HIV and AIDS, the poor and disenfranchised are hardest hit, shining a spotlight on the inequality in our healthcare system.
While some of us are fortunate enough to be able to shelter in place and work from home, many of the people most vulnerable are the ones who actually are keeping the fragile world moving — the bus drivers, postal, grocery store workers, delivery drivers, factory workers, gas station attendants and mechanics, sanitation workers. And of course the healthcare workers, police, firefighters and all first responders who are all on the frontlines, getting sick and dying, or sacrificing themselves to care for the ones who are hardest hit.
Here’s the biggest contrast of the two viruses — the availability of testing.
Once there was a chance for exposure to HIV, there was a test developed to look for the antibodies. Eventually there came medicines to stem the ravaging of the T cells that eventually leads to full-blown AIDS.
Today, there is a test for COVID-19, many years earlier than it took to develop tests for HIV. Yet the lacking availability (along with personal protective equipment for healthcare workers and other front liners) is a travesty of epic proportions.
America’s nicest actor, Tom Hanks and his wife, actress Rita Wilson, were early sufferers, and survivors of COVID-19. The fact they were out of the country, so were able to get tested early speaks volumes of how incompetently this scourge has been handled here.
In economic terms, there is no comparison. We lost so many people, but we didn’t have to shut down the country. Still, we need to look at how we value each other — and if the “economy” is more valuable than people. Are we really so willing see others die so we can get our hair cut?
As we drag into another week of isolation, we need to look at our recent history and assess how we’re going to address the future.
We don’t need a celebrity to come out of the shadows, or die of this terrible disease. We don’t need to sacrifice our elderly or vulnerable black and brown neighbors to get back to work before this disease has peaked and the curve has started to flatten.
But we do need to listen to our doctors, our scientists and the people in our local governments who are trying their best to keep us safe.
