That doesn't uniquely describe COVID. It describes pretty much every virus you have heard of.
The gradient for viruses trends strongly towards trading severity for contagiousness. They do not generally "mutate past all defenses and kill", the generally "mutate past defenses and give slight to non-existent symptoms", for several reasons, the two most important of which is that killing means they can't spread anymore, and at the Pareto frontier (which viruses live on all the time), contagiousness and severity are in active conflict with each other; energy put into one comes right out of the budget for the other. And viruses have no particular interests in making you ill... they want to spread.
You've been amped up to a level of fear so severe for viruses that if your fear was accurate, there would be no multicellular life on Earth, because highly contagious and severe viruses would kill anything that provided such a big target. So, good news! Your fear is not accurate. You can verify yourself by checking your environment for multicellular organisms that have not been killed by viruses.
But we are in a modern world where travel around the globe happens in 24 hours. Covid is contagious for some time before the patient has any symptoms, and for most people, it stops being contagious by the time some of the carriers are so sick they might die.
So, when a patient starts having symptoms in 5 days, (s)he may have had time to infect other people on more than two continents.
The fact that viruses in general can spread more widely and more qiuckly doesn't change this.
To restate this without the teleological angle: virus will not become widespread unless they are easily transmitted, and they are not easily transmitted if they make the subject excessively ill. Ergo, the most common viruses are better at being transmitted than making people really ill.
Fortunately, as of today, Omicron deaths are still at zero, and this fills me with moderate optimism. [0]
[0] https://www.cityam.com/anxiously-optimistic-south-africa-hol...
Omicron hasn't been around long enough to expect many deaths yet. Even the optimists need to wait a few more weeks.
With things like covid and the flu, vaccines will always be playing catch up with variants. Its not like the measles which doesn't mutate. Infection and hospitalization rates for vaccinated with covid are already significantly higher than the flu as far as baselines go .. it's reasonable to say we can't expect vaccines to snuff out this kind of disease.
Therefore, the only realistic way to stop the spread is with ruthless targeted testing, tracking, and quarantining. But the problem with that method is by the time we're aware of a problematic strain, its already spread too much for quarantining to be effective.
Nature is inevitable. Once we've done all we can, all that's left is to learn to live with it.
Stalling the spread is useless as well - we have already had two major mutations in less than two years.
How frequently do equivalent Flu mutations occur?
Well, there is, we just don't want to pay for it: vaccinating poor countries, where effectively the mutations are being created by high infection rates.
Also there haven't been enough variants as to determine that most variants are coming from poor countries. Speaking of delta, India has more population than the entirety of Europe. Mathematically it makes sense than a variant could come from there regardless of whether the vaccine does anything.
It has greatly slowed the spread. The highest vaccinated countries have almost stopped it. There is every reason to believe that high vaccination across the world would stop covid, and anything less will ensure continued spread (and mutations).
People demanding an all or nothing from a vaccine are missing the big picture.
Israel has faced waves of 3 different viruses - original, Alpha and Delta what have required different level of immunization and Israel has managed to vaccinate itself out of 2 of these waves.
Looks quite impressive to me.
I also fail to understand why people pretend that 2 doses should be expected to stop Delta that has higher viral load - it does not make any sense.
It is a probabilistic game - antibodies are not smart - they are like mines - you need to have high enough concentration to stop viral particles to move around. If the viral particles can overload this concentration - they are going to win. There obviously must be some threshold of antibody concentration below what you can't avoid infection - when 2 dose regimen reaches it too quickly, well, game over. 3rd dose regimen is known to boost antibody concentration and keep it high for longer time. There is no surprise here and yet even people in position (like WHO) that should know better have intentionally ignored it.
Why would the current crop of vaccines be able to stop the virus, even if applied worldwide, seen that they don't prevent infection?
The evidence is still not solid on whether or not it does this, as far as I am aware.
There's a significant difference between COVID-19/SARS-COV-2 become endemic, and it continuing as a pandemic that threatens public health systems due to caseload density. Yes, we're unlikely to get beyond it being endemic, which means that like influenza, it will continue to be an issue, but we can certainly get a point where it is "just endemic", which would be a huge improvement over the current situation.