Why COVID is like AIDS

Hint: not because the risks are similar.

In 1981, doctors in New York and Los Angeles saw healthy young men sicken and die within months, their immune systems apparently destroyed.

The deaths set off a frantic search for the culprit. By 1983 virologists had identified a novel pathogen they would call Human Immunodeficiency Virus.

Over the next decade, scientists learned much more about HIV, whic…