In addition to AIDS, there were major American flu pandemics in 2009 and 1968. 1957 too, depending on how old you consider to be "living memory" - many federal leaders were teenagers at the time.
IIRC, I was a teenager when AIDS came out. It was not classified as a global pandemic.
It's quite hard to catch and was mostly limited in the US to IV drug users and gay men. It became a human rights issue because both of those populations were generally deemed to be sinners and people tended to not care if they died.
The fight was not just against the disease itself. It was very much against prejudice and the threat of draconian measures aimed at specific populations.
Non drug using heterosexual populations in the US mostly didn't care. It was largely deemed to be irrelevant if you weren't one of the "sinners" that most folks wished would drop dead anyway because we're so loving and Christian and all that.
I don't think we've ever had a global pandemic in my life. SARS was the closest and it was mostly in Asia, IIRC.
>>> It became a human rights issue because both of those populations were generally deemed to be sinners and people tended to not care if they died.
My father was a medical doctor at the time, specializing in diagnosing and treating brain cancer, and told me that although docs were scrambling to treat a growing flood of AIDS patients, there was a quiet resentment at the need to reallocate scarce resources for a disease that was largely preventable (except for tainted blood transfusions). Cancer was (and is) a much larger problem, killing hundreds of thousands of people every year; then there's heart disease which kills 647,000 Americans every year.
To say IV users and gay men were "generally deemed to be sinners" who didn't deserve to be cured is a vast exaggeration. Certainly there were and are people who think this way, but the general population, both lay and medical, certainly didn't. That would include the general non-fundamentalists among the American religious community.
The fact is that thousands of unsung researchers worked long hours, first to understand HIV's structure and mechanism, then to figure out how to prolong life, and most recently, how to actually cure it. Unfortunately, some gay activist groups such as ActUp felt these efforts were insufficient, and showed up at medical conferences to chant "killers!" at the scientists who were presenting findings. This created more resentment.
Look, everyone's feelings are inflamed in a time of crisis. It's important to let cooler heads prevail, and not descend to name calling or deriding this or that group. Especially in the current situation, we're all in this together, and we will sink or rise together.
there was a quiet resentment at the need to reallocate scarce resources for a disease that was largely preventable
This is all too often how prejudice gets expressed. The resentment and hostility towards the group in question gets justified on some reasonable grounds other than racism, homophobia, etc.
I believe people suffering addiction are self medicating in the most literal sense for either medical or mental health issues that are going largely unrecognized and for which they aren't getting appropriate care. I think blaming them for "getting something preventable" is not significantly different from blaming those who got AIDS via transfusions for being so awful as to be in need of blood.
Gays were often living in the closet. The need to hide their orientation had a lot of real world negative consequences with serious implications for their health choices. Blaming them for getting something "preventable" is similar to telling women their abusive husband wouldn't beat them if they just didn't piss the guy off so much.
For the record, let me apologize to Christians and to the mods. I'm not anti-Christian and I've spoken in their defense before. I was in no way trying to start a religious flame war. My disgust with homophobia and with society's attitudes towards people suffering from addiction wasn't intended to impugn Christians or the Christian religion.
> To say IV users and gay men were "generally deemed to be sinners" who didn't deserve to be cured is a vast exaggeration. Certainly there were and are people who think this way, but the general population, both lay and medical, certainly didn't.
This just is not true. The sidelining of AIDS as someone else’s problem is well documented in Randy Shilts’ book. People were still making jokes about AIDS in 1983 when people had been dying for several years. Ronald Reagan, President throughout this whole time, did not publicly acknowledge AIDS until 1987.
In the 1980s, the general population absolutely reviled gay people and gay men in particular. Don't downplay the deep stigma that gay people experienced at the time.
For years, all diagnosed AIDS patients were expected to die within 12 months. It wasn't spread as broadly, and the flu pandemics weren't as deadly, but the general concepts that pandemics can strike hard and fast were definitely within leaders' personal knowledge.
But you don’t have to shut down the economy to deal with AIDS because it’s sexually transmitted. That’s my point: the vast majority of people have never had to make serious changes to their behavior or lifestyle to avoid contagion before.
That I agree with, but as far as I can tell the degree of measures we're trying to take are unprecedented even in non-living memory. School closures and public gathering bans, sure, but those measures happen pretty frequently during lesser scale outbreaks. If anyone tried to ban social calls during the Spanish Flu, I'm not aware of it.
> as far as I can tell the degree of measures we're trying to take are unprecedented even in non-living memory.
This is exactly my point. Nobody in the west has ever lived through something that has necessitated these kinds of measures. People thought this kind of thing only happened in the movies, Asia, or Africa. That it couldn’t happen to us. And that lack of personal experience is why, in my opinion, our response was probably always going to be slower than it needed to be.
But my concern is, are these kinds of measures actually necessitated? The entire argument for doing them appears to be that China did them; in fact, I'm not sure I've seen anyone make an argument, rather than just silently assuming "extreme social distancing" must mean Wuhan-style authoritarian control. You say "Asia and Africa", but before 2020, is there any precedent at all for controlling a pandemic by mandatory universal lockdown of its healthy citizens?
In other words, what are the chances that we look back in a decade, and realize that we inflicted a month of trauma on the country because we assumed authoritarian China must have a good reason for it?
I mean, there’s the basic logic that reducing human interaction will inhibit the virulence of something which spreads by human interaction. My personal opinion is that we probably could have avoided blanket shutdowns if we had ramped up testing capacity in late January and February. Now the hope is that we avoid becoming Northern Italy. I think the Chinese have demonstrated that it’s possible to avoid an outcome like that. Whether we’ll be severe enough in our lockdowns to pull that off is another story. Doesn’t seem like people around me are taking this seriously enough. But I’ve been self isolating since late February.
They didn't. That's why it killed tens of millions of people back when the global population was about 1/4 of what it is today, and mobility was much more constrained. No jets in 1918.
The expected death toll from Covid, assuming an overall mortality rate of 1%, would be about 75 million people. So far the death toll worldwide is about 13,000. That's a big number, but only about 0.02% of the expected total without intervention.
