[hn_throwaway_99]

> Something with the spread rate of COVID-delta, and a high lethality rate after a long incubation period.

I sometimes think how "lucky" (obviously, luck is relative) humanity is that HIV is an STD and not an airborne virus with the transmissibility of Delta.

[forty]

For some reasons I feel HIV treatments would have been found much more quickly had it been the case. Just like I'm pretty sure mosquitos would have been eradicated (or another solution would have been found) if it had killed so many people in developed countries.

[hn_throwaway_99]

I think that's a good and fair point. Reagan famously didn't even mention AIDS publicly until 1985, 4 years after it was discovered. Urban gay ghettos in NY and SF were basically experiencing a plague with young, otherwise healthy men dropping like flies, and the world at large either (a) didn't care, or (b) was glad that AIDS was "killing all the right people".