Don’t viruses mutate to become less deadly over time? If so, why is there so much concern over mutations? Isn’t that what we want.
tl;dr: you're looking at an average trend that may or may not actually exist. There's no guarantee that it will follow the trend, that it is average, that it won't become worse in some aspects or that the trend even exists.
[1] https://www.asbmb.org/asbmb-today/science/112920/will-the-co...
[2] https://theconversation.com/will-coronavirus-really-evolve-t...
[3] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-will-the-coro...
COVID already spreads very well, what with the ability for it to spread while incubating silently for a couple weeks. A more-deadly version that retains the slow and silent incubation, but then kills mercilessly, would likely still spread just as fine.
You can imagine if they did, the propaganda engine of 2020 would have used the concept to launch lies about how it'll eventually become so mild you really don't need the vaccine. A certain president was stating early on that it would just fade away. It didn't.
All the info floating about was already confusing (and even contradictory) to the general population. There is no need to muddy the water with details that aren't applicable at this time, and may never be.
Mostly I've seen a very mixed bag of opinions, reactions and measures over the past year and a half.
I think people are pushed to extremes because there's a heady mixture of:
1. an invisible, unthinking enemy breaking through borders affecting everyone and causing an inflection in basic social etiquette that demands action in very grey and alien moral zones most people have no experience in
2. the internet increasingly dominating the human experience while still being a relatively new, mindfuck global network that (a) undermines basic instincts honed for thousands of years, (b) increases fringe and extreme communities by enabling distributed social networking, and (c) enables surveillance and individual targeting on a scale most preceding dystopian literature couldn't imagine
3. unsolveable, self-perpetuating issues such as racism (as a proxy for culture wars and systemic oppression), conspiracy theories / misinformation (as a means of fracturing and neutering political movements that empowers users and proponents like a heroin-dealer empowers the neighborhood) and wealth inequality (the 'meritocratic' cloak over the otherwise naked aristocracy of capitalist societies) all dominate discourse and news cycles with the apocalyptic 'slow' train of climate change coming into view that we can't avoid because the sheer scale escapes our petty existential crises and sadistic impulses that have driven history and gotten us here (wherever the hell 'here' is)
4. the release of the tiger king documentary
What backfired is not so much what the experts were saying, but how there was always an 'anti' chugging away at the press and online to make sure nobody knew what was what. We spend way too much time debunking crap info instead of just dealing with the good-at-the-time info provided by the experts.
They aren't hiding anything from the public. They just aren't planning on teaching the public absolutely everything about pandemics - just what is needed to be known at any given time. Otherwise you end up with too much information for anyone to even begin to understand what they need to do.
Telling people that some viruses eventually weaken has no benefit to anyone. The current virus isn't doing that, and raising hopes that it might is bound to give propagandists more fuel to work with.
Viruses only become less deadly if they are so deadly that hosts die before they can pass on the virus. No such pressure exists for COVID as patients are infectious during the incubation period.
If you're a developed country swimming in vaccines like the US, do you let the delta strain go for it? Drawing it out with lockdows only makes the vaccine less effective, and once you lock down, it becomes clear there is no exist strategy. What if you're a large city with 80% vaccination rates? Will there be anger over preventable lockdowns? What if you're facing a recall election?
What if you're Europe, have moderate vaccine coverage, but likely won't be able to vaccinate to herd immunity for the same reasons as the US?
In hindsight, knowing the virus would be 2.5x worse in a year and a half and half your population would have no interest in the vaccine, should you have let it spread?
Citation needed.
> COVID is becoming more deadly over time because there is a selective pressure towards more transmissibility. More transmissibility can increase the severity of illness if the virus more readily replicates or more easy infects human cells.
I read that as talking about infection fatality rate (IFR). I'm not aware of any evidence that covid's IFR is increasing.
It seems that the Alpha variant is more virulent than the original, but it's hard to measure virulence to a high degree of confidence.
IFR is not quite the right thing to measure, we are interested in differences in mortality due to mutation of the virus, but there are many confounding variables in the quality of treatment and populations that get infected to remove. e.g. if a virus stayed exactly static you would expect mortality to decrease over time as better treatments are found.
Consider the seemingly randomness of chemistry at the biological level is what determines this.
Although less deadly, highly contagious are more likely to spread for longer.
A mutation which alters the shape of the spike protein, rendering it protected against the vaccine will most likely render the virus less virulent.
Think of it as a hedged bet.
Viruses mutate over time and they could become more or less deadly over time.
The Spanish Flu mutated into a more deadly virus overtime.
https://www.history.com/news/spanish-flu-second-wave-resurge...
^ not a scientific article, simply to prove how bad the viewpoint of "mutate to be less deadly".
More reasonable article:
https://www.aap.com.au/yes-viruses-can-evolve-to-become-more...