Living in a time when our knowledge of, prevention against, and medications for HIV have drastically improved, I can never fully understand the plague that spiraled out of control and caused great desperation and widespread panics a few decades ago. In that pandemic that nobody was prepared for, thousands of lives were gone, including my music idol Freddie Mercury. No one knew what originally caused HIV, how exactly it was transmitted, and whether it could be cured. Confusion surrounded the early phase of the pandemic, causing immense helplessness and fear not only from the public but from the very people that we always trusted and looked for reassurance, the doctors.
As the professionals started to understand more about the plague, however, conservativism, homophobia, structural/racial/class inequality, corruption, mistrust, indifference, and hysteria came into play, shutting out the silver lining. Immediate hopes turned into desperation. Medical workers refused to treat patients normally even though the chance of transmission is low. Funding for HIV research was again yet again delayed. The ridiculous rules of academia delayed the sharing of important research about HIV. Churches condemned the gay community for “bringing the plague up to themselves and endangering the heterosexual community.” The gay community was against the world all by themselves, leaving collectives like 5B no way but to fight alone.
The outbreak of COVID-19, however, might have provided me some authority to claim empathy for the distant pandemic. Like when HIV broke out, the early phase of COVID-19 hit the world unprepared. We were not sure of its origin and had no effective vaccines and medications. COVID-19 proved to be equally, if not more, terrifying than HIV in terms of its incredibly high transmission rate and relatively high death rates among the unvaccinated in the early phase. Equivalently terrifying was the societal chaos that COVID continues to trigger. In China, the report of a few, or even one, positive case would start a city-wide COVID testing that covers virtually everyone. In 2020, I was once woken up at the midnight to get in line for COVID testing in my community. Despite the horrendous timing and the inconvenience it caused to the residents, we also risked getting infected while in line for testing. From time to time in China, news broke out announcing the intentional burn-down of miscounted supplies by medical workers in avoidance of accountability of mismanagement, and residents dying of diseases other than COVID due to the delay caused by COVID screening when leaving the community for hospitals. I was even more terrified when learning residents in Shanghai, one of the most developed cities in China, are now suffering famine as a result of poor governmental management. And it’s not just China. For instance, in the United States, there are people and parties who blatantly oppose science and masking, which is merely a tiny bit of the drama around COVID.
We are living in an age of plague. We have no idea what to expect. We don’t know if we can be saved. We are witnessing the dark sides of humanity while trying to survive.
Acknowledgements
Fig.1 https://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/21/books/review/how-to-survive-a-plague-david-france.html
Fig.2 https://entertainermag.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/5b.jpg
