Coco had only visited the site in order to check whether British or US spelling was being used to describe the class of medical facility which are called health centres, and not to examine whether fake news were being promoted, and whilst the video may contain much accurate information about the response of the government to the outbreak of covid-19, it began on a rather bad foot.

Coco is talking about this item on YouTube:

It is at 19 June 2024 on the home page of the Ministry of Health, Uganda but may be replaced at any time.

In the Ministry of Health Covid-19 response documentary, which was released on the 1 September 2023 we hear:
This virus killed more people in the first twenty-five weeks than HIV/AIDS has killed in twenty-five years.
These words, corrected here by Coco, appear in the transcript at c0:18

That is an interesting claim. It was followed by a reference to the 1918 Spanish ‘flu death toll after which you may see 100,000,000 appear briefly on the screen. Read that carefully: More than 100,000,000 infected. In the context you may be forgiven for thinking that it was a claim that there were 100 million deaths. Coco thought to investigate the claim. Be patient we have to look at a number of sources, some of which may be more reliable than the others.

In brief

According to a study in PubMed: Estimates of global SARS-CoV-2 infection exposure, infection morbidity, and infection mortality rates in 2020 (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34841244/) in which it is stated that If left unchecked with no vaccination and no other public health interventions, and assuming circulation of only wild-type variants and no variants of concern, the pandemic would eventually cause 8.18 million deaths. According to Wikipedia the estimated actual number of deaths to June 2024 was 7.05 millions.

Using these statistics, if we take the first twenty five years of AIDS there were 16m deaths. In the last 25 years there were 28m deaths. Both of these numbers are greater than both the estimate provided by the PubMed paper for the potential total number of deaths, and the actual number reported by Wikipedia from Covid-19.

On what basis then can the YouTube video claim that Covid-19 has killed more in 25 weeks than HIV/AIDS in 25 years? Is this not fake news?

Further resources

By way of comparison, there are other tables of statistics available for both Covid-19 and HIV/AIDS related deaths, which give higher figures than Coco has used above.

According to the Global HIV & AIDS statistics — Fact sheet  https://www.unaids.org/en/resources/fact-sheet 40.4 million [32.9 million–51.3 million] people have died from AIDS-related illnesses since the start of the epidemic. This data does give range rather than simply one figure, into which, though at the lower end, the figure on ourworldindata.org falls.

The table at Total number of AIDS-related deaths worldwide from 2000 to 2022 https://www.statista.com/statistics/257209/number-of-aids-related-deaths-worldwide-since-2001 indicates, by interpolation, that there have been closer to c.31m deaths in the past twenty five years from AID/HIV.  The figures I have used in the interpolation are given in italics in the list below:

99	00	01	02	03	04	05	06	07	08	09	10	11	12	13	14	15	16	17	18	19	20	21	22	23
1,6	1,7	1,7	1,8	1,8	1,9	2,0	1,8	1,7	1,6	1,4	1,3	1,4	1,4	1,3	1,2	1,1	1,0	0,94	0,77	0,69	0,69	0,66	0,63	0,60

This table provides smaller figures for the most recent years, but the differences between the two sources amount to less than 500k, which is an insignificant difference in the context of several millions.

Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epidemiology_of_HIV/AIDS also quotes higher figures for deaths.

Concerning totals deaths from Covid-19 Wikipedia reports https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_pandemic_deaths: There have been reported 7,050,691 (updated 17 June 2024) confirmed COVID-induced deaths worldwide. As of January 2023, taking into account likely COVID induced deaths via excess deaths, the 95% confidence interval suggests the pandemic to have caused between 16 and 28.2 million deaths. Even if these higher figures are correct, which we must remember are for a period of more than three years, then it is unlikely that This virus killed more people in the first twenty-five weeks than HIV/AIDS has killed in twenty-five years. In the first 25 weeks the highest figure we could have for Covid-19 deaths is 28,2*25/156, say 5 millions, and the lowest estimate of HIV/AIDS deaths over twenty-five years is 16 millions.

Perhaps the effect of the interventions has saved less than 1m lives (the earlier estimate was for 8 millions but the outcome was 7 millions) over the four years if the PubMed figures are to be believed.

The economic impact

An article in the Grauniad reminds us of the value of a prevented fatality (VPF): £2m in the UK US$11,6 in the USA: Are Smart Motorways Safe

On the basis of those figures the amount to be spent to save those 1m lives would be £2 billion in the UK or US$11,6 billion in the US (which in unconventional language would be £2 or US$11,6 million million). We may well want to ask, How much did they actually spend?

Reports indicate that the US has figures of US$8-14 billion (The COVID-19 Pandemic and the $16 Trillion(sic.) Virus (this article provides alternative measures which indicate lower values of a life), the UK up to £400 million (Covid-19: How much has it cost?). Both of these figures are of course open to discussion and argument. It is likely that the basis on which they have been prepared is far from agreed, though there may be a consensus amongst those who prepared the reports. That they are large and not insignificant costs is hardly however disputable, and as we shall see even if they are out by as much as 50% (ie twice the actual real cost) they are significantly higher than we would expect using the VPF figures.

The following table using figures extracted from the data sets available at Our World in Data: How many people die and how many are born each year? and Explore the global data on confirmed COVID-19 cases (set the metric to confrmed deaths, the interval to cumulative and uncheck Relative to population) shows the estimated expected local cost of saving 1 million lives globally.

Covid-19	Total cases	Deaths
	World	World	United States	United Kingdom
31/12/2020	80,318,416	1,897,597	342,920	90,475
31/12/2021	200,298,485	3,549,359	469,667	85,684
31/12/2022	424,017,377	1,249,137	267,389	39,186
31/12/2023	69,382,441	323,728	84,459	16,767
31/12/2024	1,634,763	34,726	24,133	0
(2024 is to early June)
Total	775,651,482	7,054,547	1,188,568	232,112
Anticipated deaths (PubMed)		8,180,000	1,378,187	269,142
Saving by interventions(?)		1,125,453	189,619	37,030
Value of a prevented death (VPF)			$11,600,000	£2,000,000
Expected costs of prevention (millions)			$2,200,000	£70,000
Actual estimated costs (millions)			$16,000,000	£400,000

Conclusion

Assuming that the number of deaths saved in each of these two countries is proportional to the actual number, and that the estimate provided by PubMed is reliable (but we have no other), then the expected spend, based upon the VPF figures would have been US$2,2 billions and £70,000 millions. Both countries based upon their own working VPF models (whatever shortcomings may be seen in the computation of those figures) have spent six or seven times those amounts.

Post-script
As noted elsewhere, the covid-19 infection was not the Spanish ‘flu in its impact. The death rate has settled down to about 2% of those infected. Contrariwise influenza causes 200-500,000 (possibly as high as 700,000 as we see at the end of the article) deaths per year according to data provided by Our World in Data. A different article in Our World tells us that Yet, data on the flu is limited but such as there is suggests that Influenza occurs all over the world, with an annual global attack rate estimated at 5-10% in adults and 20-30% in children (WHO). Taking these estimates there would be about 300-600 millions in adults and 400-600 millions in children of infections each year.