According to the World Health Organization, there are exactly two pandemics on Earth right now: HIV and the coronavirus. And despite some comparisons drawn online in recent days, they couldn’t be more different. In fact, to equate the trauma of the marginalized communities who experienced the HIV/AIDS outbreak in the 1980s and 90s to the current crisis is callous.

According to the CDC, from 1981 to 1987 there were 50,280 reported cases of HIV. Only 2,103 of those people were still alive by 1987; a staggering 96% of patients had already died. The CDC estimates the coronavirus mortality rate to be 0.25-3%, so, no, this outbreak is not the same.

That’s not to discount the severity of this new pandemic, but the HIV/AIDS crisis saw our government sentence an entire queer generation to death by ignoring calls for treatment development. That is not the same as a rush to develop and distribute tests and large-scale changes to society to stop the spread. In the 1980s, people believed that AIDS was “killing all the right people;” the stigma and hatred towards those living with HIV cannot be compared to the coronavirus’s patients.

While these pandemics are different, seeing mass panic and hospitalizations is triggering for many survivors of the peak of HIV/AIDS. To see the government respond to the crisis within weeks can sting. With HIV, it took two years from the first cases for the WHO to have its first meeting about the outbreak and four years for the FDA to approve a test.

Below, we’ve collected reflections on how the coronavirus compares (or doesn’t) to the HIV outbreak of 39 years ago from those who carry on the memories.

Cal Montgomery; Chicago, IL; disability rights activist

I was just a teen in the 1980s, so I missed the worst of the AIDS crisis. By the time I came into the community around 1990 as a young queer trans man, we had some idea of how to slow transmission. But so many of the people who could have made a difference weren't doing it. Kids weren't learning about safer sex practices in school. One friend's parents had thrown him out, and nobody else would take an openly gay boy either. The men who paid him for sex didn't always use condoms — but he had to eat, and he got HIV.

Without the tools to stay safe, the human instincts to live, to grow, to connect, became weaponized and began to kill people. It seemed as if no one cared. It was a time of youth, vibrancy, possibility, dehumanization, desolation, and death. We came together, we took care of each other — because who else would?

"This, to me, is pride: our insistence on living as if we, and each other, are valuable, in the face of those who insist otherwise."

Today, as a disabled, chronically ill person, the same dehumanization comes at me another way. I watch people reassuring each other that it's only my community which will die in droves, arguing for rationing care to ensure that the “right” people survive, risking lives by defying social distancing and price gouging. I see the same familiar terror: “I don't expect to make it.” “All my friends will die.” Deaf people and people with intellectual disabilities are being denied key information. Those with preexisting conditions are forced to take huge risks for food and life-sustaining medical care. The human instincts to live, to hope, to struggle, are being met with the insistence that we are not worth it. It's shattering. Again, I see a community turning toward each other, reaching out, lifting up, caring for each other, because who else will?

Once again, we find ourselves alone, together, in a community struggling with the avoidable inevitability of inconceivable loss. This, to me, is pride: our insistence on living as if we, and each other, are valuable, in the face of those who insist otherwise.

Kevin Jennings; New York, NY; CEO of Lambda Legal

I feel deeply mixed emotions at this moment as I watch the reaction to the coronavirus and think back to the response to HIV in the 1980s. On the one hand I watch the public consternation, the many governmental officials mobilizing to take action, the wall-to-wall media coverage, and I want to scream “Where was this when my friends were dying?” The disparate level of attention and alarm for the coronavirus versus the apathy that greeted HIV is like a slap in the face and a painful reminder of how the powers-that-be of our society were perfectly content to let members of the LGBT community die by the tens of thousands in the 1980s and early 90s.

“[Coronavirus] shows us that one of the deadliest of all diseases — prejudice — continues to shape who lives and who dies in America.”

On the other hand, the bumbling incompetence of President Trump as the pandemic bears down upon us is all too familiar. I have this sinking feeling that, just as our leaders fumbled the response to HIV and allowed a disease that could have been managed and contained to grow into an epidemic, we’re watching a slow-motion catastrophe unfold again, this time in real-time on 24 hour cable news, one that will again claim thousands of lives that could have been spared had our leaders moved swiftly and decisively. I fervently hope I am wrong.