On 1/13/2022 at 5:54 PM, Mira said:To be fair, viruses don't normally evolve to become more deadly, since that would only hinder their ability to spread to as many people as possible (and thus be an evolutionary disadvantage). So I wouldn't worry specifically about a new Covid variant posing any more of a threat to civilization than it's currently doing.
Agree on the former, disagree on the latter.
Viruses don't, in fact, evolve to become more deadly; but they do evolve to become more contagious, and simple math shows that a virus twice as contagious will lead to massively more deaths than a virus twice as deadly. Not in relative percentages, but in absolute numbers.
And this is exactly where SARS-CoV-2 is moving, Omicron and all.