Because of the coronavirus, the 7 million people who live in the San Francisco Bay Area have been one step shy of a full lockdown since Tuesday. Amid all the canceled plans, cratering small businesses and disruptions to everyday life, another poignant postponement stands out: The Names Project AIDS Memorial Quilt’s return to Golden Gate park has been delayed. A viral pandemic, one whose scale we haven’t fully grasped, has interacted with another.

Many Americans have drawn parallels between HIV and Covid-19, noting the inept government response, the stigmatization of certain groups and the heroism of frontline health workers. Like a ghoulish reboot of a television show, some of the same people have returned. Deborah Birx, a longtime HIV doctor in the US military who later became the United States Global AIDS coordinator, now serves as the response coordinator for the White House Coronavirus task force. Anthony Fauci, an immunologist, has been the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases since 1984.

“We had another silent epidemic: HIV,” Birx said at a White House press conference on Monday. “And I just want to recognize the HIV epidemic was solved by the community: the HIV advocates, and activists who stood up when no one was listening and got everyone’s attention.”

Her words are unmistakably direct, but for many, the comparison is a cautionary one. HIV has killed nearly 40 million people worldwide since the early 1980s, roughly 700,000 of the victims were Americans – almost 20,000 of them in San Francisco. The coronavirus has not proven nearly as lethal. Contracting it is certainly not the death sentence that HIV was for so many years, and some advocates are reluctant to push the analogy. Read more via the Guardian