@aviationdoctor.eth

As a Xennial, I grew up with the fear of AIDS instilled in me — to the point that people would freak out for three months after barely one unprotected oral exposure until they could get reliably tested. We now know that the risk is low outside of URAI, needle exchange, etc. But of course low != impossible. 4–8 per 100K hetero exposures is still significant because people have a lot of sex. That’s a 5.3–5.5 σ level of risk, which is worse than the 5.5–6 σ level of risk of dying in a car accident (~1.4 per 100M miles, or a 1–1.5% chance of dying in a car crash over a lifetime). And being an average, it hides a fair amount of variance, like how the rate is basically zero in a strict monogamous relationship, while there’s a Pareto effect at play where promiscuous people who also tend to have unprotected intercourse with strangers will drive the rate up. The same way that people who don’t wear seatbelts or speed will have more car fatalities.

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