[nfc]

> they generally don't evolve to become more deadly

That's a very important point and one that makes me agree with you in that it'll probably won't happen. This is because in most cases a virus reduces its R0 when its deadliness increases.

What I'm trying to point out is that "unlikely" is not impossible and since the stakes are high we should at least think seriously how likely the other possibility is.

For example we could think that for a virus like SARS-CoV-2 with asymptomatic contagion it's possible to think that a more deadly strain could maintain an R0 above 1 (because people pass it before becoming very ill). I talked more about this in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23025899 to which I received a very thoughtful answer.

Again that does not mean that it will happen just that it could, and I believe we should encourage an informed discussion about this possibility

[VectorLock]

I'm not an epidemiologist by any stretch of the imagination but I would think for a virus with a long incubation time and asymptomatic spreading the R0 would be similar between the infected dying and simply recovering and their immune system eliminating the virus, other than the reduction in total population.

[nfc]

That's exactly the point I was trying to make