From HIV to coronavirus: Boris Johnson must face ghosts of viruses past, present and future

Having lived as a gay man through the Aids pandemic, I have some advice for the prime minister on how to stop this crisis from becoming a catastrophe, writes Jonathan Cooper

Healthcare workers move a patient infected with coronavirus from an ambulance to a hospital in Seoul (Getty)

Like many of us, I lived through the Aids crisis. I was in my late teens as the news of this condition that was killing gay men spread. It was first documented in 1981. Being gay, I was terrified. I was just about to come out. I’d started to have sex. I leapt back in the closet and bolted the door. I became simultaneously obsessed with and petrified of Aids. In the end, I became deeply immersed in all aspects of the crisis. I minutely observed the politics. I charted progress in healthcare. Aids became a daily part of life. I didn’t become infected, but I had boyfriends who lived with, and died from, Aids. These were extraordinary times. They were awful. It was all we knew. We didn’t realise how exceptional it was. It was our normal and so we lived with it and learnt our own means of living.

And in its own peculiar way, it was brilliant. It was our Spanish Civil War.

Then in 1995 effective treatment arrived. Almost overnight the hell was over. For well over a decade, we had lived through Aids and then it stopped.