3 ms·

It reminds me of this story. Basically, a healthy host is in the parasite's best interest... https://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/19/magazine/the-parasite-undergroun

• dham 5y ago
  Same with a virus. A virus doesn't want to kill the host. A deadly virus is an unsuccessful virus
  • wizzwizz4 5y ago
    Viruses are a little different, though. Retroviruses aside, viruses spread as much and as fast as possible; any mutation that makes them spread more slowly is crowded out, evolution style. So long as it can spread between hosts well enough, a deadly virus is a very successful virus – up until it's driven its host species to local extinction.
    • DFHippie 5y ago
      The deadliness of a virus doesn't assist its spread. The deadliness doesn't make it more or less successful, everything else being equal, but usually dead hosts are hosts that don't continue to spread the virus, so things aren't equal. In most cases deadliness in viruses is selected out precisely in order to increase their spread.
      • trhway 5y ago
        Deadliness of the virus is just a side effect of its fast spread - the major part of the spread is replication which damages the host. The virus is an optimization problem - replicate and spread as fast as you can as long as the associated host damage and deaths result in the spread decrease smaller than the gain from the replication intensity increase causing that damage and deaths.
        • haberman 5y ago
          A game that you can play in simulation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plague_Inc https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plague_Inc.
  • seppin 5y ago
    Not unless it spread to other hosts first.
• Baeocystin 5y ago
  I'd love to read a follow-up of those folks, now that it's been some years. Does anyone know of such an article?