For Gert McMullin, an activist who has spent the past three decades working to memorialize lives lost to the HIV/AIDS crisis, the COVID-19 outbreak came with “a feeling of horror, like: ‘Not again.
I can’t go through this again.’” McMullin, 64, is a production manager at the National Aids Memorial and has been involved with the AIDS Memorial Quilt, an effort that began in 1987 as a means of remembering those who died from the disease, from nearly its inception.