[laGrenouille]

> The virus is smart and has evolved from an evolutionary standpoint. Infect younger and asymptomatic patients with the goal of spreading and infecting as many as possible.

I think you are giving a bit too much agency to the virus. It has evolved in such a way that optimises for further spreading for sure, but I do not think it has a sneaky strategy to use young people as attack vectors.

What's more likely is that it has evolved to replicate and spread within the human population, while not acting so fast as to kill most people. The problem is that replicating at a rate that doesn't kill most people will kill some of the oldest and sickest within a population.

[ram1981]

Another important insight is that Viruses, and germs in general, try to evolve and adapt inside the host. They don’t gain if they end up killing the host because that ends them too. Not to sound apocalyptic but I think their holy grail is something like what the machines do to humans in the movie Matrix

[rumanator]

> Another important insight is that Viruses, and germs in general, try to evolve and adapt inside the host.

That assumption has no basis at all. Evolutionary pressures don't happen due to a intentional guidance from the evolving species. Individuals mutate by chance and replicate as they can. That's it.

[ram1981]

This does have basis Refer to this section in the publication from National Academy of Sciences. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK209710/?report=reader#...

[_xerxes_]

I think their holy grail would be to become part of our genome like many others have:

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/04/science/ancient-viruses-d...