Add new comment

Compare what is comparable.
In the 1950 or before, DNA sequencing was not much of a thing.
The best way to detect AIDS is the PCR test, which was invented in 1983...
Also AIDS do not kill you in 2 weeks if you are vulnerable, it kills you in 11 years which can mess with the diagnostic of the origin if you don't know about it.
Also you do not spread AIDS by talking to a contaminated person, you need a blood exchange or unprotectd sex, so of course it's "slower", at least at first.
Then you said it never went viral before saying it kills 1.5 Millions people a year... Pretty viral to me, that might be why we noticed it, BECAUSE it was killing a lot of people suddenly (around 300 000 a year in 1990).
COVID19 killed 2 million people in 2020 alone in just one year, in it's FIRST year AIDS by it's design, did not killed that much in it's first year and was way slower in it's spread.
Aslo in 2019 it's 690 000 people who died from it, so half your number (which date back to 2013). Not to diminish it, just to recontextualise.

If you take the Black Plague (which is an extrem example), who killed between 75 to 200 million of people, I'm pretty sure they noticed.