[ebiester]

If you take into account the lifecycle of HIV, it can take 2-15 years to develop stage 3. (Stage 3 is the symptomatic part. People on medication may never reach stage 3.) As such, a transmission generation even of SARS-CoV-2 is going to be on the order of days. HIV can be on the order of years.

So, there are different evolutionary pressures. If we find out that Covid is actually latent in all of us years later (unlikely because we would have likely seen it with SARS-1 or MERS), then all bets would be off.

[soperj]

This makes sense. Would also make sense why AIDS hasn't evolved to become less deadly, but it also brings up that covid hasn't had a bottleneck in terms of transmission. The main reason why one strain has replaced another has been that more recent strains are more transmissible. Delta was more deadly (and transmissible) than alpha, beta & the original strain, and came later for instance. I think we got lucky with omicron, which evolved from alpha if i'm not mistaken.