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If you assume weekly sex and other simplifications, then a 1% rate of transmission doubles the infected population every two years. A 0.1% rate doubles it every 20 years. That's moderate promiscuity IMO, particularly since it still mostly works if they change partners annually (as opposed to weekly).
The first sentence of the tweet (emphasis added):
Assuming weekly sex with people from a pool of how many partners? We're not talking about a sneeze in a crowded subway train letting you infect a rando's from your community.
Ah ok... well, I'd focus on the attached image, seeing that is has specific figures for all types of intercourse and cites a source...
A big enough pool that it looks exponential instead of sigmoidal. Once it's spread to >50% of the group, you can't exactly double the prevalence.
As I said, swapping partners annually from that pool is frequent enough for the dynamic to play out.
Maybe your source's sensibilities are a bit more delicate than mine, but I would not be shocked by someone having sex with their partner 52 times in one year, then with a different partner 52 times in the next year, and so on.
What did I ignore? I saw the rate for anal sex, I saw the rate for vaginal sex. Was I supposed to discuss blood transfusions and needles? Construct a model that is more detailed than "heterosexual" and "homosexual"? Increase the precision from "1%" to "1.11%"?
I mentioned his deceptive claim because it jumped out at me. I hadn't noticed the problems with his second sentence when I posted that.
I wouldn't be shocked either, but that's not a typical pattern for most straight people. I also think the willingness to cease sexual activity, once you're aware you're carrying the virus, also enters into the equation.
Sorry, I rephrased it to make it less accusatory.
From your first comment:
This comment thread is how something other than higher promiscuity could explain the difference between gay and straight people contracting HIV. The different transmission rates of different sex acts are enough on their own with no difference in promiscuity.
Thanks, that clarifies it. I was mostly focusing on the image, which is why I mentioned his bad comparison in a parenthetical aside instead of the main part of the comment.
This is true in the sense that you can have a theoretical scenario, where the sexual behavior of straight and gay people is roughly the same, but yields different results, but that scenario is unrepresentative of how people actually act, and so is not particularly useful. Even under your conditions of 1 partner per year, you basically stop the spread in it's tracks if someone stops switching partners, or starts taking precautions, and 1 year is more than enough time to realize one is infected.
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