True, though usually viruses mutate into less virulent forms.
There's good reason to suspect that long-term COVID will be on the order of influenza or the common cold -- common and mild for most patients.
> Turning vaccines into a political wedge issue is one of the stupidest things I've seen in my life.
Probably, but even the question of whether vaccines should be a policy issue is in itself a policy issue.
In slovenia, by some estimates of our expert group, half the country got infected by covid (~1mio), 4450 died, almost half of them in old age/nursing homes, and out of all that, only 4 were under 35yo, only one (out of those 5) under 25, and we count every death within 28days of infection as a covid death (even suicide or a car crash).
For a large percentage of the population, it already is common and mild.
Citation needed. The delta variant is the prime counter-example with higher R0 and slightly higher mortality. SAGE admitted SARS-CoV-2 will very likely mutate to defeat all build-up immunity. Variants of SARS-CoV-2 (SARS and MERS) showed the potential to have very high infection fatality ratios.
There is no reason at all to suspect COVID will suddenly become mild.
Contagiousness can certainly increase. Virulency does not usually increase.
Severe flu seasons are characterized by increased infections, not so much increased fatality rate.
> Citation needed.
"Most viruses become less deadly as they mutate." https://www.economist.com/the-economist-explains/2021/02/27/... (The article is about how COVID might buck the general trend. But in any case, that is the trend.)
My point is that we simply do not know. The word 'usual' is deceptive here. Usual for the viruses we studied? Usual for all viruses? Usual for viruses which recently have made the jump to a new species? We do not know. We simply have no idea.
> no idea
This type of reasoning is based on an assumption that a pathogen limits its reproductive number by increasing its virulence. It is reasonable to test this hypothesis, but unfortunately we do not have enough data points to make any conclusive statements.
We need to pay attention to virologists, not HN armchair experts.