Great article, but you miss a key detail here.

There's a very good reason why these two numbers are so different, and it's that that the quantities of data collected are so dramatically different between these two fields.

The Large Hadron Collider produces 90 petabytes a year - that's 90 trillion bytes of data, or 90,000 terabyte hard drives.

By comparison, an HIV study like would be astonishing if it produced 9 megabytes of numerical data a year - that is, one hundred millionth of the LHC.

Imagine you had 1000 patients, and every week for a year, you did 10 tests on them, and represented each result with a generous 32-bit word - that would be 1000 * 10 * 52 * 4 or about 2 megabytes of raw data.

Seen in that context, it's completely expected that by particle physicists require much tighter statistical results, given they have some eight orders of magnitude more data to work with.