"We will never forget." Words spoken by many commentators referring to the current coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic. But we will. As I review the prior viral pandemics [influenza, polio, human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), and now, severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2)—all RNA viruses], much of the public health and preparation lessons from one to another were lost after about a generation and a half from the pandemic ending by both the public and the biomedical scientific community. Indeed, some current commentators have referred to the last pandemic as the great flu of 1918-1919, running past not only polio of the 1950s but also one of the greatest pandemics in history and still ongoing, HIV/acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS). When HIV/AIDS is mentioned, it has sometimes been to contrast how quicker and better we have been with COVID-19 in finding the cause and determining its genomic sequence (less than 6 mo). Of course, that comparison is absurd for at least three reasons. First and foremost, AIDS was a very new and mysterious kind of disease. There was no similar precedent, and when a person was able to be clinically recognized as having AIDS, the patient had many infections. Which if any of the recognizable infections was the cause? We learned none were. The causative agent was very far from obvious. In strong contrast, COVID-19 is caused by an acute infection from a highly replicating and obvious coronavirus, easily identified from respiratory secretions like most acute respiratory infections. HIV is a retrovirus. We had only recently discovered human retroviruses, the first, human T-cell leukemia virus-1 (HTLV-1), in 1980 and the second, HTLV-2, in 1982, and the belief that humans were or could be targeted by these viruses was only just beginning to be accepted.
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