Lawrence calmly laid out his projection that the mean incubation period for the AIDS virus was 5.5 years. Some people, he added, would not get AIDS until 14 years after their infection. These figures meant that the typical person diagnosed with AIDS in April 1985 was infected in October 1979. The huge number of people infected with the virus in 1982, 1983, and 1984, when the virus was far more prevalent, would not show AIDS symptoms until the late 1980s. Some people getting infected at the time of the conference, meanwhile, would not come down with the disease until the turn of the next
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