Covid 19 usa how to#

And so, even though the transmission modes were stigmatized, queer and Black people and users of injection drugs quickly began using condoms, creating sterile syringe exchanges, and engaging in peer-to-peer education about how to avoid HIV.īut by the time the U.S. Those most affected were marginalized people who had long built solidarity among themselves. through anal sex, injection drug use and blood transfusions. HIV initially transmitted most frequently within the U.S. I think these divergent trends are affected by who was perceived to be the most at risk for HIV and COVID in the U.S. presently accounts for about 15 percent of the world’s COVID deaths and has, at times, accounted for as much as 25 percent. Despite being 5 percent of the world’s population, 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). But it stalled and is currently below number 50 among nations’ vaccination rates. 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. could have learned from China and Italy, whose earlier experiences gave the U.S. long after people were infected and dying but with the novel coronavirus, the U.S. had various head starts with SARS-Co-V2 over other countries-more, by some metrics. What I find perplexing in some ways is that, similarly to its early access to antiretrovirals, the U.S. Yet the same drugs did not begin to be rolled out on the African continent until 2003, by which time HIV had created countless orphans and needlessly infected millions of people. got access to antiretroviral drugs in 1996, and its rate of AIDS deaths immediately plummeted (among people in in the U.S. In some ways, these disparities speak to how the Global South has borne the brunt of AIDS deaths. COVID has already surpassed this total in a tenth of the time.Īnd 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. According to UNAIDS, annual global deaths from AIDS peaked at about 1.7 million in 2004-about 23 years into that pandemic. 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).

SARS-Co-V2 is a much more efficient virus than HIV, it transmits far more casually, and everything about it is faster than HIV. In terms of virology, the potential for the novel coronavirus to lead to human death much faster than HIV is to be expected. While COVID deaths are now about 110 percent of total AIDS deaths in the U.S., global COVID deaths-about five million and growing-are less than 20 percent of the more than 36 million people who have died of AIDS. And here, we see something very different. also beg a comparison of global COVID deaths to global AIDS deaths. The comparative COVID–AIDS death tolls in the U.S. society process such a scale of grief so quickly-especially when COVID has allowed far fewer forms of collective mourning?

It is significant and worrying to see four decades of such grief compressed into less than two years. 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. Every person who has died in these pandemics is worthy of being known as they lived and loved in their time on this earth.Īlso, we will never truly know precisely how many people have died of AIDS or from COVID.Īnd yet, this milestone is important in its scale. It is hard to do justice to the more than 100,000 people in the U.S who died by drug overdose last year (a 30 percent increase from the previous year) and the hundreds of thousands who have died from HIV and SARS-CoV-2. These dire numbers are worth comparing and considering, with a few caveats.įirst, judging deaths in bulk numbers flattens what is actually happening. in 2022, while perhaps 15,000 people living with HIV may die next year of any cause. If current trends continue-and they don’t have to-hundreds of thousands of people could die of COVID in the U.S. Nearly 800,000 people are known to have died of COVID-19. in the four decades of the AIDS pandemic.īy World AIDS Day, this gap has grown. In late October, the United States passed a grim milestone: more people in the United States had died of COVID-19 in less than two years than the approximately 700,000 who have died in the U.S.

Covid 19 usa