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Comment by dandelany | Hacker News Reader

I suspect the “perfect virus” adaptively speaking isn’t deadly at all - burning down a home your future ancestors could live in doesn’t seem like a good strategy.

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There are many perfect viruses in this sense. They're all around us and we hardly take notice, and they've been around.

New viruses tend to be more virulent than old ones. And new viruses tend to get less virulent over time -- else they die out. Ebola's incubation, transmission, morbidity, and mortality are such that it burns itself out. The common cold's are such that... it's common. Covid-19's are such that it's causing massive economic damage even if the recoveries are V-shaped. Hopefully covid-19 will get less virulent soon though.

To play devil’s advocate — a not insubstantial amount of the economic damage is self-induced. We could accept some degree of risk and the associated consequences to reduce that, but we have not for various reasons that are subject to debate. I suspect in hindsight we’ll find we have overreacted due to a lack of good information.

I also suspect that some of it is just revealing economic malaise that already existed but was hidden, and this served as a Schelling point for it to reveal itself.

No economy, healthy or otherwise can withstand being intentionally dismantled and the pieces burned to ash.

If you order the world to stop production or trade for an indefinite period, poverty and depression is the only possible result, no matter how healthy the production and trade were before being stopped

> no matter how healthy the production and trade were before being stopped

The economy had at least two noticeable and possibly systemic issues before Covid-19. The several yield curve inversions combined with funding problems in the repo market. We certainly hope for a V-shaped recovery but there is no telling what kind of issues have been attributed to the virus that may still be there when this passes.

The flip side is even 1% of a populace dying is going to impede daily life even if we were all sociopaths. In reality, once hospitals get overloaded, the number is quite a bit higher than 1%. So to do nothing would also be choosing economic and societal turmoil.

Yes, and it's also not as though everyone just goes on their merry way in the midst of a pandemic just because a politician declares the country "re-opened". A large percentage of people will continue trying to isolate themselves and their families until they feel assured the outbreak is over and risk of infection is low. This will severely impact the economy whether or not there are official restrictions in place.

The only way to really get the economy going again is to deal with the virus.

Do you mean deadly by virulent? Because I don't see how being less virulent is a favorable adaptation for the virus.

Virulent here means "how bad it is to the host species". A virus with high morbidity and mortality, and high contagiousness, is a pretty virulent virus. Now, if it is too virulent, the virus might die off -- become extinct. If it is very contagious but does not sicken or kill the host, then the host won't even notice, and the virus will flourish. If continuing to exist were the virus' goal -it can't exactly have a goal, now can it?-, then being less virulent would be in its best interests. But viruses don't have goals, and this just amounts to an observation: that highly virulent viruses are rare, and that those that survive tend to be the less virulent strains.

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