Data driven HIV programming to maximise health benefits

From the perspective of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, where evidence on effective prevention and treatment interventions for severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) infections is limited, the near perfect efficacy of antiretroviral therapy (ART) for HIV treatment is enviable. ART prevents individual level HIV-associated morbidity and mortality, restoring life expectancy to near normal, and prevents transmissions by decreasing viral load to undetectable levels. To translate ART efficacy to population level health benefits, the Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS) set goals to diagnose 90% of people living with HIV, link 90% of those diagnosed to ART, and achieve 90% viral suppression among people on ART by 2020. In the 6 years since UNAIDS set the 90-90-90 goal, four large community randomised trials tested ART as a strategy to decrease HIV incidence with mixed results.