You need to take therapeutics early enough to make any difference, ideally as soon as you test positive. By the time you reach inflammatory stage and are admitted to hospital it's too late. But the way we are doing right now, the testing infrastructure is completely overwhelmed. Tried buying a kit recently? Around here they are all sold out!
We need quarantine. Here's what I don't get: when AIDS came, everyone got used to condoms very quickly, and all the gay sex clubs closed down. Why can't we change our attitude today as the homosexuals did back then?
When AIDS first came some politicians and public health zealots seriously proposed forcibly quarantining HIV carriers. That was actually a fairly mainstream position back in the 1980s, not something from the lunatic fringe. Fortunately we came to our collective senses and never imposed quarantines on any major scale.
The AIDS fatality rate at the time was virtually 100% (effective anti-viral medications weren't available yet). By contrast the CDC estimated the COVID-19 fatality rate at 0.6% since the start of the pandemic, and rapidly falling now due to vaccines and other improved treatments. A difference in fatality rate of over 2 orders of magnitude between the two diseases surely calls for dramatically different policy responses.
One valuable lesson we did learn from the AIDS pandemic is that shaming people for making unhealthy choices is not an effective public health measure. It's better to focus on education and harm reduction.
I mean, I suppose I agree with you that the government and our elites' management of it and the pandemic has been gawd awful, and particularly awful over the last ~6-9 months. What I don't understand about your point is that you're on the one hand saying "they can't even mass produce tests via the Defense Production Act and put them in the mail" and then on the other saying "government managed quarantine is a good idea".
Perhaps because contracting HIV meant near-certain death after a long drawn out decline, and Omicron looks to be less deadly than the flu for a vaccinated elderly person?
Magic Johnson is still in good health after > 20 years, due to very effective antivirals. Nowadays HIV is a chronic condition, manageable with medication, not a death sentence, but people haven't gone back to fucking like rabid badgers.
What I'm saying is that today life expectancy of a 21 year old who is HIV-positive is only 9 years less than of a seronegative individual. If you are diagnosed now as a young person you can expect 30 or 40 years of decent health, it's a very manageable condition, but people haven't gone back to full-on crazy. Outcomes like Magic Johnson are the rule nowadays.
We need quarantine. Here's what I don't get: when AIDS came, everyone got used to condoms very quickly, and all the gay sex clubs closed down. Why can't we change our attitude today as the homosexuals did back then?