Covid-19 Tracker: What Did We Learn From HIV/AIDS?

San Francisco CA

20 February, 2022

10:14 AM

Description

By Mark Rabine, Mission Local February 18, 2022 Good morning, Mission, and welcome to Virus Village, your (somewhat regular) Covid-19 data dump. Hospitalizations are plateauing, while positivity rates and recorded infections continue trending downward. Recent R Number models show San Francisco below 1. Some consider San Francisco's relatively low covid numbers to be, among other factors, a consequence of what the City learned from the HIV/AIDS crisis in the '80s and '90s. Many still remember the struggle to get San Francisco's Department of Public Health to pay attention to the disease and to respond with more than closing bathhouses. Although some doctors, like Diane Havlir, put their experience with HIV to valuable use in confronting covid, DPH has displayed little institutional memory. Reading this essay reminded me of those battles, and pointed to similarities in the covid crisis, especially at this stage. To read the full article, click here. Mission Local covers San Francisco from the vantage point of the Mission, a neighborhood with all of the promise and problems of a major city. You can support Mission Local here.