In his second epidemic, doctors remember his first epidemic

When COVID-19 approached about a year ago, Mayor Bill de Blasio told Dr. Mitchell Katz, the head of gays at New York City Health Hospital, “the most difficult thing to do”. He said he was trying.

The pandemic quickly overwhelmed the city’s public and private hospitals. The supply of protective equipment to protect doctors, nurses and other medical staff from the virus has decreased. When the city was closed, the house became the workplace of many New Yorkers. Traffic noise, overhead planes, and all the sounds that are usually part of the city’s daily life were silenced, but for the ambulance sirens that were carrying sick people to hospitals without their rooms. It was replaced.

“I thought I’d do something more difficult,” he said, graduating from medical education in San Francisco in 1989 during the worst years of the AIDS epidemic and in 1991 by the San Francisco Municipal Health Department. Said Katz, who joined the group. The first thing I thought was that there was nothing more difficult than that. “

COVID-19 took about a year to kill more than 500,000 people in the United States. The death toll has been rejected by the Trump administration, which refuses to support and in some cases opposes common-sense measures to slow the spread of the virus, such as masks, social distance, and closure of public places where the virus spreads easily. I was supported. Trump also promoted fake remedies and remedies.

HIV was first noticed in 1981, and while deaths from the virus had begun to approach 500,000 by 2000, anti-HIV drugs had already begun to maintain the health and longevity of HIV-infected persons. Before these drugs appeared, HIV killed far more people infected than COVID-19, but COVID-19 infection is serious and the effects are long-lasting.

“The biggest difference … all my patients usually died within nine months,” Katz said of the time he was treating AIDS patients in San Francisco. “At AIDS, I never felt that my system was overwhelmed.”

Growing up in Brooklyn, Katz ran the San Francisco Health Department from 1997 to 2010. He has been heading the Los Angeles County Health Department since 2010. In 2018, it was hired to lead a health hospital with 45,000 employees. It operates 11 public hospitals in the city, skilled nursing facilities, and dozens of community health centers in the city. We also run Metro Plus, a health insurance plan.

Katz was an early supporter Herd immunityThe idea is that the virus will not spread anywhere if there are enough infected people to recover. He also opposed the widespread closure of businesses, public places and schools. The city quickly abandoned its position as it became clear that leaving COVID-19 unchecked would be a disaster.

In contrast to Trump, in the early days of the AIDS epidemic, then-President Ronald Reagan was clear of injections into people affected by HIV, especially gay men and drug users.

“We didn’t really let people tell us to protect ourselves from wearing condoms,” Katz said.

Still, instead of encouraging the use of condoms for safe sex, Reagan urged individuals to take the unrealistic approach of practicing abstinence to avoid becoming infected with HIV.

What applies to both occurrences is that bias was a central feature. Trump and his allies have decided to call COVID-19 the “Chinese virus.” This was an effort to move the blame from Trump’s failure to respond to China and burn his base against the enemy. The outbreak of COVID-19 in the United States was accompanied by a significant increase in anti-Asian violence.

In AIDS, gay men and IDU were early targets. They were accused by conservative media and refused to service in hospitals and other public facilities. After their death, family and friends noticed that many funeral homes refused to bury them.

“My last general comment was how prejudice emerged in both cases,” said Katz, who pointed out the growing anti-Asia bias. “It reminded us of all the prejudices about gay men and drug users in the early days of the AIDS epidemic.”

The abundance of COVID-19 outbreaks and the low AIDS epidemic led by Trump, denying that COVID-19 was a dangerous pathogen and refusing to wear masks and increase social distance. , Many Americans who support the general view. COVID-19 is not a serious threat.

In San Francisco, Katz and other health staff have been the subject of protests by a small group of activists who have accused HIV of being an anti-HIV drug, not the cause of AIDS. These protests were ultimately threatened enough, with Katz and other health staff filing criminal charges, but the protests never spread. He also fought activists over keeping sex clubs open in San Francisco.

And death was common to both outbreaks. At a press conference with De Blasio in January, Katz recalled, “Most of my friends and colleagues were infected … the funeral was held weekly.”

The high death toll from COVID-19 hides the reality that doctors have succeeded in saving many people infected with the virus.

“”[I]I’m crying when I think of people who don’t have to experience the horrific pain seen by friends and patients in the 1980s, “Kats said at a news conference. “It’s a great job and New York City should be very proud.”

However, the dead are still casualties.

“Loses are cumulative,” he told Gay City News. “I lost a lot of the people I loved during the AIDS era. It gets harder.”

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