I heard really early reports that cases were being looked into to see if the new virus was being spread by mosquitoes.
That would have had a different ending in a lot of ways.
I was at Homestead in the early ‘80s. We got a lot of mileage out of the nasty little mosquitos that a hurricane blew in from Haiti...wondering if they’d recently fed on any gay Haitian junkies. Mean little suckers. If you got sweat on the jets, they’d attack it.
I recall it being in papers that up to 10% of the Haitian population jn the US had “it”, and speculation that being Haitian predisposed one, genetically, to catching it.
Later, the samples were found to be heavily weighted to known, high risk groups within the Haitian community; i.e. iv drug users, promiscuous, homosexual, hemophiliacs getting copious blood products that were not screened then.