Well, keep in mind that the transmission vector of HIV and SARS COVID are completely different. If we had found in the 80's that HIV was transmissible by simply breathing the same air as those infected, we'd likely have seen a similar response... without all the "work from home" benefits that we currently enjoy.

I doubt it. Pandemic preparedness, including for airborne diseases, was the same for decades until it was all thrown out the window to do something wildly different that had never been done before.

Which - evidently, as we're still having "lockdowns" and "resurgences" 1.5 years after that "two weeks to flatten the curve" experiment - didn't work.

What was the old preparedness that we "threw out the window" in favor of lockdowns and masks? As far as I know, humanity has rarely bothered with any pandemic reaction beyond "stay away from the visibly ill" and "go out less".

In pandemics, you isolate only the sick, treat them, and offer prophylaxis to vulnerable groups.

In COVID, we isolated everyone, sick and healthy (utterly unprecedented), then flooded the most vulnerable with sick people (bizarre care home mismanagement), and refused to give treatment or prophylaxis to anyone until they couldn't breathe, at which point they were put on a ventilator.

In some places, that's still the protocol. Others have learned from these mistakes and moved on.

When everyone has, COVID will cease to be a problem.

The original approach has worked for every other novel virus pandemic we've had - which happen regularly every few years. Even the very same people at Imperial College made similarly dire predictions for some of those pandemics at the time - and yet none registered more than a fraction of a flu season.

That original protocol, used repeatedly for years, was abandoned and effectively reversed for COVID, with ongoing disastrous results as anyone can plainly see.

I’m old enough to remember when we didn’t know who was infected and who wasn’t infected.

Iirc theres images of 1908 spanish flu protestors inciting others to wear masks.

Also i believe there was a pandemic response force that trump admin threw out.

Conversely, I'm trying to imagine what would have happened if hiv had appeared in the social media age.

Well in this thought experiment do you also have a government that wants to use HIV to kill off the homosexuals?

You have to give it to the homosexuals - they started using condoms and shut down the clubs where you would have sex with ten different men every night. Meanwhile, in large tracts of the country we are still arguing if masks are a good idea.

Well that comparison might make sense if the masks were made of latex.

> And despite killing ten times as many people as COVID

That's an INCREDIBLY disingenuous comparison considering that COVID-19 has been with us for less than two years.

And, though I object to your characterization of said measures, extreme measures weren't taken because you couldn't catch it just via proximity. Also important to point out one big similarity - denial of both was used to dehumanize swathes of the population who were especially vulnerable.

Not really, at the rate death is declining overall COVID will almost certainly kill far fewer in the same timeframe.

And given differences in policy, and differences in resistance to them have not resulted in any discernible difference in result (ie, it's wild mess that makes no sense and more typically returns results opposite to expectation), it largely appears this would have been the case had we not ruined everything over it.

> Not really, at the rate death is declining overall COVID will almost certainly kill far fewer in the same timeframe.

Looking at Google's worldwide deaths I don't see much of a decline. Sure, it's down from a peak, but it's actually on the way back up. What data are you using for that assumption that deaths are on the decline?

> And given differences in policy, and differences in resistance to them have not resulted in any discernible difference in result

South Korea, with a population of 51.71 million, is currently sitting at just over 2,000 deaths. Do you believe it to be sheer chance that their deaths are so low when compared to America?

Sweden and UK saw an almost identical death curve per million despite diametrically-opposed policy decisions.

Gibraltar had almost no COVID, vaccinated literally everyone and then had a massive (and ongoing) outbreak.

We can go back and forth for hours with many examples proving and countering each factoid of the "narrative" - and only make my point; it's an inconclusive mess.

Rigid adherence to the prevailing dogma is clearly foolish in such a situation.

As for deaths, if you really want to argue about it, you need to exclude the "died within 28 days of a positive test"'s, the ridiculously-ignored co-morbidities, and the "cases" that resulted in death that were based on RT-PCR's at cycle thresholds above 35, obviously. Those coronavirus "high score table" sites don't do that nor bother to account for any of many subtleties in reporting that can and do have major impact on results.

Good luck trying to figure any of it out then. But hey, don't let that stop you entertaining a false adamancy - I'm sure it feels just great.

Using Ioannidis and others you can make some attempt using seroprevalence studies if you're really interested, suffice to say it's just generally much, much less overall than the SAGE-induced nonsense, you've undoubtedly succumbed to, would have you believe.

Finally, as now hundreds of peer-reviewed RCT's worldwide have shown, it's now one of the most treatable illnesses out there, if you bother to understand its mechanism of cell infection and how to inhibit that, instead of not doing anything to help and then putting people on a 25%-survival-rate ventilator, which thus far has been the most common response.

The problem is not scientific or medical anymore, its political and social. The science and medicine has been worked out for months now.

He didnt die of a gunshot wound he had a comorbidity of blood loss.

Ah well, he tested positive for gunshot wound but thst was 28 days ago.

This is not an inconclusive mess in the peer reviewed scientific community when people use real data and studies to back their claims. The problem is that you are not sourcing your opinion from that community you are sourcing it from pointless online bickering and a confirmation biased perspective.

As for sweden your comaprison to the UK is disingenuous. Compare it to norway and finland for real understanding.

Governments the world over have made repeated, clear statements that if someone tests positive for COVID, and then dies within 28 days for any reason, the death is counted as a COVID death.

That is the end of any validity in test-derived deaths data.

I am sourcing my opinion exclusively from published, peer-reviewed science in well-established journals. If you are not aware of any of it, as it appears you just admitted, you are not a sufficiently qualified researcher and should refrain from comment.

You do understand in vivo and in vitro are different terms for a reason right? That chloroquine worked in the lab but that the coronavirus can use a different pathway than the one chloroquine inhibits?

You're completely misinformed.

There have been hundreds of peer-reviewed RCT's in vivo, in live human COVID-infected patients of many differing treatments for COVID, several of which have demonstrated high efficacy in reducing hospitalisation and death as both prophylaxis and treatment.

https://c19early.com/

Please explain how this is completely misinformed with regard to chloroquine, which is all I mentioned.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32698190/

The context was treatments for COVID, and you brought up only one of the least studied and least likely effective of the studied treatments you could have mentioned. Misinformed.