https://news.yahoo.com/covid-19-collides-hiv-aids-100051925.html"Geneticists and infectious disease specialists there have uncovered potentially dangerous coronavirus mutations in a 36-year-old woman with uncontrolled HIV who was unable to shake the SARS-CoV-2 virus for close to eight months. The driving force behind the patient’s rapid accumulation of genetic changes is probably her impaired immune response due to her unsuccessfully treated HIV, the researchers said...
...For 216 days, the woman continued to test positive for the SARS-CoV-2 virus. She was hospitalized with moderate illness for nine days in September soon after she contracted the coronavirus, but she never became severely ill with COVID-19.
Still, the coronavirus that lingered in her body underwent 13 genetic changes related to its crucial spike protein, along with at least 19 other genetic shifts elsewhere that could change the behavior of the virus.
The new findings raise the specter that HIV/AIDS — a 40-year-old scourge that has killed 32 million worldwide — could complicate efforts to eradicate a COVID-19 pandemic that has killed more than 3.5 million in less than a year and a half.
Until the South African patient, there has been little evidence to suggest that HIV-infected people could complicate the pandemic’s trajectory. HIV-positive people were not known to be more likely to become infected with the coronavirus. And research had suggested they did not suffer worse medical consequences of COVID-19.
But if her case turns out to be typical, that picture could change: HIV patients whose infections are not controlled with medication could "become a factory of variants for the whole world," said Tulio de Oliveira, a geneticist at the University of KwaZulu-Natal in Durban, who led the new research.
Worldwide, roughly 8 million people are thought to be infected with HIV but unaware of their status. An additional 1.7 million are on antiretroviral medications that aren't working well.
The prospect that close to 10 million patients’ uncontrolled HIV could spawn new coronavirus variants has wide-ranging implications.
“This is a syndemic,” said Dr. Jonathan Li, using a term that describes the confluence of two epidemics with the potential to worsen outcomes for both."
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Just going to reiterate that it's too soon for everyone who feels like it to take off their masks in crowded indoor spaces. There are unvaccinated people now walking around with undiagnosed AIDS and superspreading new Covid variants that they invented in their incubator bodies. Sure it's more of a problem in Africa and India as the article points out but that doesn't mean nobody in America can't also make their contribution and also even if it doesn't happen here there is nothing stopping this virus including any and all variants from globe trotting over here. With so many unvaccinated and with the serious potential for variants to breakthrough vaccinations, the masks were an extra last line of defense that it was foolish to throw away. Of course serious travel restrictions were a first line of defense that was never utilized at all. Now we're basically just letting it all ride on one throw of the dice, vaccines. It's the height of foolishness, hubris, and unrealistic optimism. If it actually works out alright, it'll be a major miracle, winning dice rolls millions of times in a row.