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THREAD. It’s National HIV Testing Week. #HIVTestWeek
HIV is still with us, despite huge progress since the dark days brought to our TV screens in #ItsASin
What can 40 years of fighting HIV tell us about our way out of the COVID-19 crisis? Here are 12 thoughts:
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HIV is still with us, despite huge progress since the dark days brought to our TV screens in #ItsASin
What can 40 years of fighting HIV tell us about our way out of the COVID-19 crisis? Here are 12 thoughts:
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1. This plague will change us. For all the inevitable yearning from some — but not all — for a pre-COVID-19 world, tomorrow has been altered. There is no going back. Neither should there be.
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2. Some of that change will be personal. As Andrew Sullivan has reflected, just as HIV did, COVID-19 will have far-reaching consequences for how we relate to one another — and for our sense of what really matters.
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3. What governments do is paramount. But they must work with experts and citizens. If they eschew either or both, still worse allow political considerations to override them, they will fail.
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4. This is a long game. The astonishingly speedy arrival of vaccines is cause for hope but we are a long way from out of the woods. There are no magic wands, world-beating or otherwise.
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5. We cannot control the virus. We can only control our responses to it both individually and institutionally. We cannot eliminate risk, but we can mitigate and manage it. And some will choose not to.
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6. Plagues hit the poorest hardest. The economic challenge created by COVID-19 puts the financial crisis of a decade ago in the shade. But austerity is not the solution — investment is critical.
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7. If we ignore or perpetuate inequalities of access to treatment between the developed and developing worlds, we will reap the consequences. In a globalised world, there are only porous borders for the virus.
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8. Vulnerability to plagues is man-made, not God-given. Structures, systems and processes must hardwire kindness, dignity and human rights. They are the hard edge, not the soft filling.
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9. We must commemorate those who have died. As Matthew D’Ancona has urged, we must find ways to acknowledge the scale of the loss. Memorials and monuments don’t bring people back to life but remembrance matters.
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10. We must be prepared for the next pandemic. It will come. If we have not learnt the lessons of this one by the time the starting gun goes, it will be too late. And lives will be needlessly lost again.
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11. The root cause of plagues is environmental. We didn’t invent COVID-19 any more than HIV. But we did incubate them. So to quote Mary Robinson, ‘we must make climate change personal in our lives.’
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12. As David France said in After Surviving: A Great Gift, a lot of good can come from a lot of death. But sloganising and grandstanding gets us nowhere. We must talk to each other, not ourselves— especially those hardest hit. And we must act.
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