July 15th, 2020

Really Rapid Review — AIDS 2020 Virtual

National Library of Congress, 1970.

The International AIDS Conference — or AIDS 2020 — shifted from its Bay Area dual locations of San Francisco and Oakland to be entirely online.

Digital. In the cloud. Virtual.

The primary motivation for the switch was to show off what the numerous tech giants in the region could do with this fancy thing called the World Wide Web.

You know — Google, Apple, Facebook, Oracle, Intel, Hewlett-Packard, Cisco, Twitter, Zoom, and the whole gang — flexing their digital muscles.

Ha, ha.

With that silly preface out of the way, here’s a Really Rapid Review™ of some highlights — which encouragingly included some very important HIV research. Off we go with some highlights:

At this point in these Really Rapid Reviews™, I often comment a bit on the host city’s cuisine, or sites, or weather, or something local. (Sharon Lewin says I captured Melbourne perfectly. Very proud of that comment.)

But since this was a virtual meeting, what can I discuss? The conference website? Acknowledging that it must be a huge challenge to put these meetings on this way, I confess to finding the AIDS 2020 site rather baffling. Fortunately, several people (including one of the conference chairs, Monica Gandhi) circulated brief tutorials. Here’s a nice guide, too.

Still, the search function was wonky, and I couldn’t figure out a way to share the URLs from the abstracts; as a result, the links in the above summary refer to outside sources.

And yes, it’s mostly NATAP, which remains the most reliable place to find conference results — despite a web design that hasn’t been updated since 1999 (my estimate). Thank you, Jules Levin and Mark Mascolini!

As usual, if I missed something important, put it in the comments section. Also — will we meet in person next year in Berlin? What do you think?

4 Responses to “Really Rapid Review — AIDS 2020 Virtual”

  1. Rodolfo Ochoa says:

    Great review!

  2. Mark S Shaefer says:

    Great update and nice shout out to Jules and Mark from NATAP.

  3. Donna Futterman MD says:

    Aside from this review being super helpful, I want to highlight your call for rapid (even if imperfect), cheap home testing for COVID 19 as a way to facilitate repeated ongoing testing to identify infections, decrease infection rates and enable more rapid return to work and out of home activity. Worth all of us reading your blog, discussing and joining your call.

  4. Peter Figueroa says:

    Great rapid review. Many thanks

HIV Information: Author Paul Sax, M.D.

Paul E. Sax, MD

Contributing Editor

NEJM Journal Watch
Infectious Diseases

Biography | Disclosures | Summaries

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