When scientists encounter a novel situation, they nearly always shape their thinking by analogy. The analogy that the scientist-bureaucrats who designed the COVID pandemic policy (many of whom came to prominence during the HIV pandemic) immediately latched onto in the early days of COVID was HIV, the virus that causes AIDS. Nearly every element of COVID policy was derived from a misapplication of lessons learned from HIV policy. Among these include a number of false presumptions:
The faulty application of lessons from the HIV pandemic explains why many aspects of COVID policy were adopted. And the differences in the biology of HIV and SARS-CoV-2 (the virus that causes COVID) in each case explain the failure of these policies in the latter case. The sole exception—a policy with no direct or obvious analog to a policy adopted during the HIV pandemic—was the society-wide lockdowns implemented in most developed countries worldwide in March 2020. Those were a radical departure from both HIV-era policies and standard pre-existing pandemic plans for managing airborne respiratory virus pandemics.