I agree with you, it's still classified as an ongoing pandemic and has killed orders of magnitude more people than coronavirus for what it's worth - but at the moment it is nowhere even close to being comparable with the comprehensive devastation that coronavirus has brought over the world, especially not when one accounts for AIDS being a thing for almost 40 years while coronavirus is barely one year old.
There were no country-wide lockdowns for months for AIDS, there never was any factual reason to believe AIDS could be transmitted even by being in the same room as an infected person, there were no people dying in hospitals because there were not enough ICU beds because literally every single bed was occupied by another person infected, there were no entire industries employing many many millions of people being destroyed overnight (hospitality, tourism, events, sports).
Again: don't get me wrong, AIDS has been a devastating illness especially for the LGBT community. Still, doesn't mean that it's wise or sensible to compare it with coronavirus.
> It's not the illness causing havoc, it's the country wide lockdown
It is the illness that's causing havoc because people are filling up all available ICU beds - and to make it worse, they're needing intensive care like ventilators and ECMO far longer than previous illnesses!
That's a true but questionable statement, because of how beds availability is handled by hospitals (at least here in the UK).
A relative of mine is a doctor and beds occupancy is often high in this season: this is because hospitals try to work at capacity and extra beds can be converted into ICU beds when needed.
This is how the NHS managed to survive the peak back in March (and how it will probably survive this peak which seems to have similar numbers).
I'm sure saying it doesn't make for a very compelling headline though.
Meanwhile people with more serious diseases (eg cancer) are postponing going to the hospital and dying.
I also consider the lack of scaling capabilities of our public sector to be a shame and I think we should put the private (which was heavily affected by job loss caused by the lockdowns) sector to work on it (converting privately owned businesses into it, speed training people to deal with the illness - we had almost a year to prepare).
But I don't see our society being agile enough to handle it in time from a regulatory point of view.
