Phill Wilson: HIV/AIDS Can Teach Us Something About COVID-19 in Black Communities
AIDS activist Phill Wilson said fighting HIV/AIDS can teach us a lot about how to handle COVID-19 in Black communities.
Two decades after effective antiretroviral drugs became widely available for HIV, African Americans still make up 43 percent of new HIV diagnoses. They've also died from COVID-19 at one and a half times the rate of white people.
Longtime activist Phill Wilson has spent four decades fighting HIV/AIDS in Black communities. Unless we learn from our successes and failures with HIV/AIDS, he said, COVID-19 will be with communities of color for a long time.
In 1981, Wilson was a young Black man living in Chicago when his then-partner, Chris Brownlie, went for a physical and learned he had swollen lymph nodes.
"And his doctor mentioned something about this strange disease
