Nope. Bronchopneumonia is almost certainly not pneumocystis. It’s almost certainly some other bug, and maybe just garden variety bacterial pneumonia.

Bronchopneumonia is just a radiology term that describes what is seen on an x-ray. It doesn’t say anything about what bug is causing the pneumonia. It just says where the infection is. And that’s the wrong place for Pneumocystis.

I was being sarcastic in my above post. And now I kind of regret it because I don’t want to get into a debate about what bug killed Freddie. It doesn’t matter, and it feels creepy. But you talk a lot about this subject, so I suppose it interests you. But you say things that reveal limits to what you know.

The testing situation in the 80s for asymptomatic people at risk was a very bad and precarious situation. It’s really not how you describe it at all. The licensed tests were designed to get HIV out of donated blood, not to help people at risk. There were gay groups opposed to the test and who tried to get its release blocked, at least in the US, as they feared it could be abused. The atmosphere in those years was pretty horrible, there was a lot of ugliness and talk of quarantine. Not only that, but the meaning of a positive antibody test in an asymptomatic person was controversial as to whether it meant the person was infected or not. And come on who says Freddie got tested anyway? Lesley Ann Jones? Anyway as long as he was still playing the field, why get tested. It takes a while to seroconvert, and in any case you could get infected the day after you test, and if you test positive there is nothing you can do about it. At the time it was thought that only a small percentage of people testing positive would ever get ill. This scenario of Freddie feeling fine but going for repeated testing makes absolutely no sense at all. They were measuring antibodies, not virus.

But whatever. You’ve related this story before so I guess you’re convinced of it. If you want to know what that era was like, there are books you can read. This picture you paint is not how it was. False positives/negatives were not a major concern. There were lots of other greater concerns that surrounded testing.