It's literaly 10 seconds to find that information, but here you go.
https://www.google.com/amp/s/fortune.com/2021/04/07/the-cdc-...
There's bit less info on the new variant than on original one we had a year of expeirience with but it's comming in.
Becomming less deadly is a typical direction viruses evolve but at a time scale of hundreds and thousands of years, not few months.
Just think about it. Virus doesn't have an agenda. It's just self replicaing piece of crap. It replicates because it can. And while it replicates it sometimes spawns variants that can replicate better.
As long as killing hosts doesnt significantly affect ability to replicate there's no reasons why variant that kills less should be have any advantage over other variants. And sars-cov-2 is so mild in objective terms that it's far from expeiriencing any trouble from killing too much.
> Also a source for that, as this is an idea I have never heard of before.
You never heard that while viruses evolve they sometimes gain ability to spread to organisms they had trouble infecting before? And then there's more of those viruses so they achieved evolutionary success this way?
That's literally what just happened with coronavirus as it evolved ability to spread through sub population of certain primates.
> I haven't even seen any definitive answer whether younger people are just less affected by Covid, or really do not become infected.
There was research about infection rates in school children (not sickness but infection) and it seems to be significantly lower than among the adults. Not sure how convincing you'll find it.
> The whole "asymptomatic carrier" idea really makes it hard to prove anything.
Only if you look at symptoms. If you do a test you can learn a lot.
> If we are just delaying the inevitable, then why wait?
Because it could happend in a year if we throw out hands in the air or in a century if we reduce opportunities for the virus to evolve 100 times.
> then we need to consider the effects of on-going lockdown and destruction of opportunity for young people (which is very real).
Yes. But we also should see this thing in perspective too. Suddenly we care about young people's opportunities now while we happily exploited them to wait out tables or be stuck in other dead end jobs witout any reasonable chance of devolpment. Unpaid interships. Tuition. Being kept in hostile and mentally destroying school environment just because parents need to be at work.
We only started thinking about young people's opportunitues when it inconveniences business.
> If I had been told at the start that we would be under effective house arrest until researchers had developed a series of vaccines with the intention of stopping Covid from mutating into hypothetical potentially worse variants, I would have called BS right then
There were initially hopes that this virus won't be capable of evolving this fast. Other coronaviruses seem to be fairly stable in conparison to other things like flu.
And also nothing is binary. I think it would be better if from the start there was hard 5 year ban on any sort of business activity that involves entertainment for groups of people, like dinig, concerts or whatever and permanent move to remote education and work whenever possible. Small business people wouldn't be kept perpetually in waiting, when can they do a little business again. And education would have a reform that is already decades overdue.
But noone was decisive enough to do something like that. Everybody thought that we will be able to go pretty much business as usual with perhaps brief pauses. And we are all hoping that soon world will be same way as before the pandemic as it was so wonderful and perfect back then. Which it won't before our covid vaccine development and distribution outpaces covid evolution (which depends on number of new infectios) and/or some revolutionary drugs are discovered that will make it less of a death/disability risk with proper outpatient treatment.