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Comment by mensetmanusman | Hacker News Reader

Of course, no way to control coordinated mask wearing for 7 billion people simultaneously without decades of planning.

HIV has killed around 50 million over the past 40 years, and we know how to stop that but it is still endemic and will be for at least a century.

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Well, HIV is different - once you have it you’re infectious for life unless without some sort of intervention.

Sure, but you also can't transmit HIV just by being in the same room.

I reckon it's harder to get people to always practice safe sex than it is to wear masks.

people are having sex a lot less frequently than they are breathing air, though

Heh, speak for yourself ;)

/joke

Fortunately HIV isn't communicable by sharing air. Despite that truvada costs $2000/month[] in the us. And, unless I'm mistaken, it needs to be taken for life, or until a proper cure is found and hopefully that doesn't cost $2,000,000. Truvada costs more than the median us salary. I'd rather risk covid19. Death would come much faster than an agonising death from untreated aids.

[] https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politic...

> Truvada costs more than the median us salary.

While your points about the obscene cost of Truvada are spot on, your point about US incomes is not.

For 2019 the median US income was $36,000 [1] (not ~$20,000). The median US full-time income was around $52,000 [2]. The median family income was $86,011 [3] and the median household income was $68,703 [4].

[1] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEPAINUSA672N

[2] https://www.census.gov/library/publications/2020/demo/p60-27...

[3] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEFAINUSA672N

[4] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEHOINUSA672N

I believe that HIV is still considered an epidemic, and in fact a pandemic, which is not the same as being endemic.

Edit: This comment is being downvoted for some mysterious reason so I'll add a reference: "HIV/AIDS is considered by some authors a global pandemic. However, the WHO currently uses the term 'global epidemic' to describe HIV." [1]. There may some confusion as to what 'endemic' means by some commenters here...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epidemiology_of_HIV/AIDS

Not sure of today, but as recent as 2011 it was. I don't think a lot has changed there. Wonder why your comment was down-voted.

Medication exists that can prevent HIV from causing AIDS and from passing the infection to others and also medication exists that can prevent the user from becoming infected.

Practically speaking HIV is a solved problem.

Is the general consensus that the virus would be eradicated if everyone wore a mask? Is it enough?

If that drops r below 1 long enough it would have to right?

This seems especially hard to do though, since compliance would need to be nearly universal. You could potentially wipe out influenza and the common cold at the same time too though potentially.

Influenza and coronaviruses have native (animal) reservoirs that keep pumping out new / novel variants, which makes extinction highly unlikely.

What about viral reservoirs?

Some individuals may stay infectious forever. E.g. Typhoid Mary[1] was quarantined twice, and the second time she remained isolated until death. (Thypoid fever is a bacterial infection, but I assume something similar can happen with a virus.)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Mallon

Herpes, HIV...

In addition to the others, there'd be a long tail of few infections before it's actually wiped out, and during that period I expect too many people to just stop caring about masks for it to actually get eradicated.

This probably depends a lot on the quality of the masks and the whether people wear them properly or not. So far I'm not too optimistic about either.

It really doesn’t. Poor quality masks are questionable at an individual level but even if everybody just wore knickers on their head, that would have a gigantic effect on the spread on the virus overall.

That would be great if true, we'd be able to scale down the social distancing, among other things. That said I'm not nearly as confident that the effect will be that great, do you have any references you're basing this on?

HIV is not asymptomatic though. If you have it you know it, and thus you can protect yourself and those around you. If we had an indication of who's a covid carrier we could have fought the pandemic a lot better.

HIV can absolutely be asymptomatic, and can be for long periods of time (~10 years in some cases). And it can be transmitted during this phase.

I stand corrected

The initial infection can be flu like. After that it becomes asymptomatic and that can last a long time.

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