AIDS demography is better predicted by ethnic demography than virus tests

By Jim Bowery
Version 20030815
Copyright 2003
The author grants the right to copy without modification.

The correlation between cumulative AIDS cases and HIV positive tests in 2001 is 95%.

The correlation between cumulative AIDS and the conjunction of a largely black or hispanic population with a largely Jewish white population is 98%.

Mitigating factors are at work on both sides of this debate: There are fewer data points supporting the HIV correlation (33) than the ethnic correlation (51) however the distribution of points in the HIV correlation is more "normal" than the distribution of points for the ethnic correlation. Unfortunately, no good arithmetic solutions exist to provide the degree of statistical significance given not only the number of data points but also the departure from normality.

Nevertheless, given the highly colinear nature of the ethnic demography data points across such a broad range, it seems quite valid to consider ethnic makeup at least as important in the demographic prediction of AIDS as the existing sampling methods for demographic HIV status, particularly given the social as well as economic costs of gathering HIV status data.