4 November

One to ponder as you pack into pubs, gigs, restaurants and planes. This is the urgent research underway to understand similarities between HIV and Covid. All of the experience of Covid to date is in that 0-6 week mark, where people get an infection, are more or less sick, and then recover (or not). Then they think it’s over, and get 2-3 more infections in a year. They enter the ‘clinical latency’ stage, where the virus lives in you but you don’t notice it. Just prior to that it ‘seeds’ your lymphatic system. With HIV we know at the other end of that latency period, which for HIV is normally 8-10 years, the virus has done so much damage to the immune system (CD4+ cells) in the latency period that the immune system collapses. That’s what AIDS is. What’s bad about Covid so far is that we’re seeing dysfunctional immune responses (people catching everything right now) already only a few months after infection, not 8-10 years.