I'm really afraid it will mutate into something more serious as well as being as virulent as it current is. That would be really really bad.
Take Ebola (a well known virus, with very high mortality). It's very hard for Ebola to spread. It tends to make people obviously sick, and also kills quick, both of which make it much much easier to control. I'm guessing you don't spend a lot of time or energy avoiding Ebola.
Contrast to AIDS, which did not make people sick, and so was easier to catch from a seemingly healthy person. From an AIDS perspective weakening the immune system against other diseases was a flaw in the plan. Once it became rampant though there were (and are) behavioral changes to reduce the chance of infection. Those behaviors are now "normal" because, well, AIDS.
The "common cold" / flu etc are all covid, or covid-like viruses that constantly mutate and constantly do the rounds. We develop immunity over time and they mutate into milder (but more infectious) versions. We take steps to avoid these, but meh, if you get it you get it.
Some behaviors from this pandemic will remain (stop letting - or worse requiring - obviously sick people come to work for example) - others will fall away (I don't see the mask thing sticking around forever...) We'll probably work from home more than we did before, but that was already a trend, this has just accelerated it. Even when we get back to normal I don't think I'll be flying to a city for random meetings anymore.
But that's semantics. The point is that Aids has a long time between infection and death, thus encouraging spread.
Ebola for example gets you sick, and you die quickly. This results in it not spreading well.
AIDS kills you very slowly (over multiple years) so it has lots of time to spread (fortunately for us it's hard to catch).
So the perfect virus would have the transmisabilty of Omicron, but with no symptoms for years - then by the time the first person dies we all have it already.
Fortunately we haven't seen that one yet (in my lifetime anyway) and to some extent worrying about it is fruitless because there will be pretty much nothing we can do about it.
You may as well be worried about every other ELE - asteroids, alien invasions etc.
There are no goals, paths or planning in evolution, evolution is the result of chance. Selection pressures are what keep the effects of genetic mutation in check. The selection pressure that might cause a virus to become weaker is the result of the virus literally dying in all of the corpses it creates, while weaker strains potentially live on in the hosts they didn't kill. People aren't dying in droves because of COVID, so that selection pressure doesn't exist, and the virus is free to mutate into more virulent forms.
Also, evolutionary timelines span many, many human lifetimes. In that time, a virus could very well become more fatal, wipe out entire species and die off itself like the majority of species in the history of the Earth, or it could become endemic in a different species afterwards and live on.
Thus natural selection optimises for forms that spread but don't kill.
It may also find an unlucky local optimum where it shows no symptoms for a period while already being highly transmissible and then slowly kill or leave the survivors with permanent damage.
Mix AIDS with Omicron and you can stop bothering to save a pension.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/224043344_Coevoluti...
DOI:10.1017/S0031182000055360
The Black Death (1) and the Spanish Flu would like to have a word. Humans eventually evolved sufficient immunity to defend against the pathogen, but significant proportions of the population died before that happened.
(1) not a virus, IIRC, but the same evolutionary pressures should apply
And hoping not to start a thread on antibiotics and superbugs, but bacteria do naturally select as well.
The Spanish Flu followed a similar path to Covid, it started deadly but then naturally selected to become less deadly. Its also somewhat unusual because of the numbers of displaced persons at the time returning home, the lack of basic medical knowledge etc.
But here's my point. The Spanish flu has mutated now to be basically Flu. It's not "deadly" anymore (for some definition of deadly). Non deadly mutations naturally select over deadly mutations.
Respiratory viruses that only or mainly have human hosts need ambulatory vectors.
From the AP's "Viruses can evolve to be more deadly" article[1]:
> Day said there are documented cases of animal viruses that evolved over time to become more lethal, including myxoma virus in rabbits and Marek’s disease in chicken.
> Some viruses provoke severe symptoms in their hosts that make it easier to transmit the virus to others. But those same symptoms can wind up killing the hosts.
> Adalja said one example is Ebola, a deadly virus that spreads through the blood and body fluids of infected people. Another example is norovirus, which causes diarrhea and vomiting, and leads to hundreds of deaths each year in the U.S.
> “The virus, speaking anthropomorphically, just wants to spread and have its genes replicated,” said Adalja. “If the best way for it is to spread by causing severe symptoms it will continue to do that.”
Viruses evolve to spread as efficiently as possible, what happens to the host after they have spread is from a viral evolution point of view utterly irrelevant. So they can and do evolve to be more lethal. Maybe it takes a bit longer before you die but that's perfectly fine.
How is the norm for viruses to continue to become more lethal? That does not align with anything I've ever heard. That link doesn't even claim that, and that's a baseless "fact check" done by a mathematician acting as a false authority.
The norm is for viruses to end up somewhere in the middle, but chances are that the lethality is still very high. The whole idea that viruses evolve to be less lethal simply isn't true and very much outdated.
> That does not align with anything I've ever heard.
That is possible, it is a pretty persistent thing but it has been dealt with decisively since the 80's:
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/224043344_Coevoluti...
In a nutshell: it is likely that viruses (and other parasites) change once they have made their jump to a new species. This change is mostly random, selection pressure will lead to maximizing for R0, which may or may not lead to a lower level of lethality but this is by no means guaranteed. Some outliers may evolve to become more lethal, some other outliers may evolve to be (much) less lethal, but for the bulk an intermediary level of lethality (which can still be very high) is the normal outcome.
This is experimentally confirmed over and over again over the timescales that we have been doing these.
The shortest way in which you can condense all this is: "to a virus it is replication that matters, not what happens to the host after it has replicated". Of course viruses don't have any conscious plan but the evolutionary mechanism selects for (more) successful reproduction so it will seem like that from the outside.