Quote Originally Posted by Yppej View Post
I thought today of an illustration of the point I have been trying to make about immunocompromised people and covid.

Think back to the AIDS epidemic. A person would have AIDS and die of pneumonia. But really it was AIDS that killed them. If pneumonia didn't get them (see I am using the gender neutral plural as a singular again - you can teach an old dog new tricks), something like Kaposi's sarcoma would. In either case the real cause of death was AIDS.

Similarly today an immunocompromised person can die "of covid", but if not covid the seasonal flu or something else would have done them in. The underlying condition is the real cause of death.

If someone is 95 did covid kill them or did they of old age? If their immunity is so weak due to chemo, isn't their death really cancer related?
While this is an apt analogy as far as it goes it ignores one CRITICAL difference between HIV and Covid. In order to get infected with HIV one had to have sex with the other infected person. All of us gay men who were having sex back then knew the risk and as a result it was normal behavior to ask "You negative? You play safe?" and then decide what to do from there. Yes there were cases like Kimberly Bergalis that caught it from her chitty dentist and blood transfusion patients before reliable HIV blood tests came into existence, but by and large the people dying of kaposi's sarcoma and all the other horrible infections that killed HIV patients caught HIV by having sex with infected people. They made a conscious decision to risk contracting a fatal illness. Contrast that with the person who gets covid when they go to the grocery store and spend a few minutes in line behind a contagious covid carrier or working the register when a covid carrier comes through their line, or when their relative/friend/neighbor brings them groceries and covid, and the comparison breaks down.