Anthony Fauci guided Americans through the 1980s AIDs epidemic. Now survivors say those lessons offer a roadmap for the coronavirus.
The slight, bespectacled doctor speaking at a White House briefing on TV revived bleak, 30-year-old memories for Gary Cooper.
As COVID-19 ravages the globe, Cooper and gay men in Austin and worldwide who survived the AIDS epidemic have often found themselves reliving the dread and anxiety of a bygone era. They say they have long-refined templates for establishing new cultural norms for protecting against disease and advocating for communities that lack life-saving resources.
Both diseases also share a particularly devilish characteristic: Those who lack symptoms can carry and unknowingly transmit the virus. Doctors are still learning about COVID-19, but have established that those with underlying health conditions seem to be most at-risk of dying. Those in the African-American community who have less access to healthcare resources seem to be the most vulnerable. For example, 70% of Louisiana’s COVID-19 deaths were of black patients, even though they make up only 30% of the state’s population.
“There isn’t this idea that people deserve to have gotten it, or that they brought it on themselves somehow,” said Toby Johnson, who owned Liberty Books, an LGBT bookstore in Austin, with his longtime partner Kip Dollar. “That made it so much more difficult. You were afraid to tell anybody that you might have it or did have it.”Dr. David Wright, an Austin doctor who treated many of the city’s earliest AIDS patients, said hospice care grew in popularity during that era.
Those who were deeply involved in the response say they learned the importance of outreach, especially in minority and poor communities, where accurate information about the spread of the virus was lacking. They also learned to tailor their message for specific audiences.
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