[jerf]

"a highly contagious virus that has shown significant ability to mutate at scale"

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.

[ptaipale]

This theory of "killing means they can't spread anymore" doesn't really work out with diseases like sars-cov2. It might have worked in a medieval world where people travel by foot, horseback or sailboat, and with a disease where the carrier stays contagious forever.

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.

[PaulDavisThe1st]

A virus that kills the patient will still infect less people than one that doesn't.

The fact that viruses in general can spread more widely and more qiuckly doesn't change this.

[PaulDavisThe1st]

> And viruses have no particular interests in making you ill... they want to spread.

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.