Illness as Metaphor and AIDS and Its Metaphors

I know even educated people fall into the trap described by Sontag of treating illnesses as metaphors, but as someone living through a pandemic, I'm considering that Sontag didn't sufficiently emphasize how divorced from science most of the population is- even some of the educated population. Metaphor is the only way they have to process most of the world even if the metaphor is completely wrong and even if they don't consciously appreciate metaphors or literature either.