Covid or Cov-AIDS??

 

I wrote about concerns about the similarity between SARS-2 and AIDS back in November:

Here's info on Covid causing lymphopenia (aka lymphocytopenia), the reduction of B, T, and NK cells that fight off intruders in the body (i.e. our immune system). The only other disease that causes this is AIDS, and now some people are referring to Covid as Airborne-AIDS [or Cov-AIDS, more recently]. Back in January 2020, the Lancet published a paper that found 63% of Covid patients had lymphopenia. Public health should have been screaming this from the rooftops!!

I also mentioned it in December and April .

But Pedro Lérias wrote a much more compelling comparison even before all that:

"The HIV pandemic was first suspected in 1981 when cases of a rare form of pneumonia started to pile up. By then, the people who were dying had, on average, become infected ten years earlier, in 1971. 

Now, imagine that you are in 1971. The people getting infected with HIV then suffer flu-like symptoms for a few days and then recover. No one dies from the acute infection. If doctors had known about the HIV virus then, what conclusions would they have reached? Some people got ill for a week or two with this virus; others barely had a sniffle. No deaths. They would have concluded it was pretty mild. Better still, those already infected seemed to have acquired immunity and didn't suffer the acute symptoms if they got infected again. They would have probably imagined that herd immunity would happen once everyone was infected. 

If would only be years later, when the first people started to die, that they might suspect something was up. But even then, people died 'with' HIV and not 'from' HIV. Kaposi's sarcoma, pneumonia, chronic diarrhea... It wouldn't look like HIV was responsible. That reality would still be years away in 1974. Three years after the 1971 boom in HIV infections, most people still felt and looked fully recovered from the virus, so much so that people wouldn't care if they got infected. There would be no public health insistence on wearing condoms or safer sex. In 1974, HIV would have been thought of as a mild, benign virus. AIDS was still years away. 

I guess you have long realised where I'm trying to go. For SARS-CoV-2, we are in 1974, three years after the infection became widespread. And governments are telling people to stop 'wearing condoms' (masks) and to have as many unsafe 'sexual' (social) encounters as they wish. But we already know how the HIV infection turned out in the long term: the development of AIDS and premature death. But for Covid, AIDS is already coming up much sooner: Strokes, hepatitis in children, diabetes, you name it, Covid is causing it already, and it's still 1974.

Can you imagine what the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic will look like in 1981?"

That's in 2030. I really like to hope the similarities have been overstated and we're all still here then, but I'm not hopeful. It's pretty terrifying to think about since over 70% of people have had at least one Covid infection. Thinking back, I didn't even know about AIDS until 1983 because it hadn't affected my friends or family directly, and it wasn't really in the news until then. That's what Covid feels like right now - a lot of people are oblivious to it because they've been lucky enough to not have been directly affected by the worst of it, so far. And mainstream media severely downplays its spread and effects.

The NY Times published the parallels between Covid and HIV back in June, 2020. They all knew of the possibility of the loss of immunity from the get go, but removed all mitigations and public protections anyway. Here are graphs comparing the death rate averages per day of 2016-18 (blue line) to each of the years of the pandemic in Canada (black line). The first one is just children 0-14; the second one is overall.  (h/t Diego Bassani who compiled info from the Human Mortality Database)

Consider if wearing a mask in public places is right for you.