Look at Brazil

In Philadelphia, an HIV-prevention group has partnered with another youth-focused social services organization to connect patients experiencing homeless or housing insecurity with appropriate resources. By offering wellness and housing services in one location, the partnership is making accessing help a lot easier for the vulnerable populations they serve.

Many health care facilities that supply needles don't have the proper training or experience to work with trans-identified people that are undergoing hormone therapy. To help address this gap in care, an education and advocacy nonprofit in Eugene, Oregon acts as a hub for the community's clean needle exchange needs.

When health care funding was cut in the United States, HIV clinics were hit harder than some other areas, impacting not just the medicine, but also the staff in these facilities. The Whitman-Walker Clinic in the District of Columbia, however, found a way to combat these changes by broadening the range of people they were caring for and mimicking service providers that were qualified as federally qualified health centers.

The San Francisco Bay Area has had fewer COVID-19 deaths than would be expected for such a densely populated area, largely by "drawing on resources and expertise that predated the coronavirus pandemic." Unlike other large cities, the Bay Area was able to quickly identify where hotspots may emerge, and initiate changes – such as allowing only one entrance to hospitals and not using traveling certified nursing assistants in multiple nursing homes. City health officials also increased outreach to at-risk minority neighborhoods, after seeing the virus disproportionately impacting these communities elsewhere.

As Covid-19 spread throughout regions of South Africa, public health clinics began reporting seeing fewer patients for HIV viral load testing due to shelter-in-place orders. In trying to mitigate the longterm implications of people missing their appointments, a few HIV specialists have joined the frontlines in local communities to act as both coronavirus testers and information conduits for HIV programs.

Rwanda, a country with the same population of Ohio, has emerged as an example of how to slow the spread of coronavirus, with only 1,500 cases reported so far. Besides initiating a lockdown, implementing free testing, and recruiting community health care workers, police, and college students to be contact tracers, officials also used "the same structure, same people, same infrastructure and laboratory diagnostics" that had been working to contain the spread of HIV.

When virologists and genomicists in Seattle, Washington realized that COVID-19 was likely to spread to the United States, they began to research ways to keep vulnerable poplulations safe. So far, early success has come from replicating the Seattle Flu Study, which uses a swab test to "reveal the trail that the flu takes as it passes around households, homeless shelters, office parks and communities in the city," and now investors are putting money towards getting these tests into households.

There are six countries that have reached "90–90–90" targets meaning, "90 percent of people with HIV in a country know their status, 90 percent of those diagnosed are on treatment, and 90 percent on treatment are virally suppressed." The solutions that have worked for these countries, like cross-sector partnerships and evidence-based prevention campaigns, are now models for regions still fighting to reduce rates.

There are over one million people in the United States living with HIV, reaching a crisis level in states such as Georgia; however, countries like Namibia are offering lessons for how to tackle the problem. By offering a community-centered approach that addresses underlying issues like poverty and lack of access to education, the country has seen a significant decrease in new diagnoses.

An organization aimed at providing peer support for gay black men living with HIV that started in Atlanta, Georgia has now gained an international following. Because the program is not federally funded, data can be difficult to gather; however, "self-reported data from its members including medication type and adherence, CD4 cell count, and demographic information" shows a significant increase in members adhering to their medical regimen.