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Yes. And it will evolve into a fairly benign endemic virus just like its cousin: the common cold coronavirus.

HarryHirsch 5y ago
How do you know? HIV hasn't evolved to be any less deadly in the 40 years it has been around. Instead, there's most excellent treatment available and people have changed their behaviour.
- oblio 5y ago
  We'll probably do a bunch of these. Vaccines, treatment for the worst symptoms and potentially treatment against the virus itself. I think we're working on all these fronts. I wonder how much we'll change/have to change our behavior long term, for example 10 years from now. I'd imagine not much.
  - HarryHirsch 5y ago
    I wonder how much we'll change/have to change our behavior long term, for example 10 years from now. I'd imagine not much. I'd say it's the exact opposite. It's known that immunity against coronaviruses isn't long-lasting (look at the Rev Jackson and his wife, both of whom were vaccinated early this year and are now in hospital) and that antiviral treatment needs to start early (does everyone really want to do a PCR test every other day so they can start antibody treatment early like Governor Abbot?) We'll have to start wearing masks indoor and stop being in crowded rooms until the virus is eradicated. Right now, with the population half vaccinated, we are setting ourselves up for a re-run of Marek's disease, this time in people.
    - oblio 5y ago
      What we should do and what we'll do will be very different. 5 years of reduced socialization will turn a large percentage of the population into nervous wrecks.
    - ilammy 5y ago
      > until the virus is eradicated But doesn't COVID have animal reservoirs? If it does, good luck vaccinating all the bats and monkeys of the world. Or what's the plan there? Wait until the virus has subsided “enough”, then... what exactly? Still be on guard 24/7/365/4, paranoidally testing each and every traveler, ready to quench a cluster formed around some volunteer returning from a distant part of the world?
      - HarryHirsch 5y ago
        Nonpharmaceutical interventions work pretty good. Plague is endemic in rodents in the Western US, there are actually a dozen human cases every year, but there aren't epidemics because we do rodent-proofing. Rabies has an animal reservoir, but we vaccinate our dogs. Honestly, I don't understand the appeal of the ostrich strategy. Vaccination rates in Florida and Illinois are similar but in Florida, where they pretend Covid doesn't exist, the only thing they get is overflowing hospitals.
        ilammy 5y ago
        I'm more talking about some humans getting infected somewhere, then bringing it in from wherever they were, where precautions are lower than where you came from. The way I see it, the long-term route is treating COVID like, say, malaria. You would get your vaccine when you travel places. Doctors would know what to test for based on your symptoms. But still, the contagiousness here is radically different. By the time you get to see your doctor, you could have infected dozens of people. So the most effective strategy is still isolation and pervasive testing? IDK, I guess we will just have to sit there and see where we'll be with COVID in 5 years from now. Maybe the virus will really just get bored and go away (unlikely). If not, maybe people will get bored of being freaked out and more comfortable with the thought that electing a new government won't eradicate the virus but you can build more hospitals and keep getting your yearly COVID booster shots.
        erhk 5y ago
        Maybe if the chinese keep their same lockdown and close their border indefinitely, or maybe for new zealand this is the case but for countries in the EU and NA the cats out of the bag and it wont ever be eradicated. I dont know who told you eradication was still an option but it stopped being one in feburary of 2020 when nCov19 started commmunal spreading. This. Does not. Go. Away.
    - erhk 5y ago
      If we got every human being vaccinated with a 100% efficacious vaccine for all strains at the exact same time globally without pause then MAYBE eradication would be feasible. Eradication is a fever dream, did you bother to read the attached article?
- RegBarclay 5y ago
  HIV is a different family of viruses, so the comparison to the corona family of viruses doesn't apply.
  - erhk 5y ago
    Excuse me?
- manojlds 5y ago
  HIV is what it is because of its type. If all viruses are like that we probably won't exist or would have evolved to fight it better.
- argvargc 5y ago
  And despite killing ten times as many people as COVID, these changes were achieved without destroying small businesses and jobs, plunging millions into poverty (and likely later starvation), gross human rights violations and police brutality, and reintroduction of segregation into previously free democratic societies. (Just like with all other communicable diseases of modern times.) Go us.
  - SketchySeaBeast 5y ago
    > And despite killing ten times as many people as COVID That's an INCREDIBLY disingenuous comparison considering that COVID-19 has been with us for less than two years. And, though I object to your characterization of said measures, extreme measures weren't taken because you couldn't catch it just via proximity. Also important to point out one big similarity - denial of both was used to dehumanize swathes of the population who were especially vulnerable.
    - argvargc 5y ago
      Not really, at the rate death is declining overall COVID will almost certainly kill far fewer in the same timeframe. And given differences in policy, and differences in resistance to them have not resulted in any discernible difference in result (ie, it's wild mess that makes no sense and more typically returns results opposite to expectation), it largely appears this would have been the case had we not ruined everything over it.
      - SketchySeaBeast 5y ago
        > Not really, at the rate death is declining overall COVID will almost certainly kill far fewer in the same timeframe. Looking at Google's worldwide deaths I don't see much of a decline. Sure, it's down from a peak, but it's actually on the way back up. What data are you using for that assumption that deaths are on the decline? > And given differences in policy, and differences in resistance to them have not resulted in any discernible difference in result South Korea, with a population of 51.71 million, is currently sitting at just over 2,000 deaths. Do you believe it to be sheer chance that their deaths are so low when compared to America?
- mrfox321 5y ago
  HIV has evolved to be less deadly: https://www.pnas.org/content/111/50/E5393 https://www.pnas.org/content/111/50/E5393
  - q1w2 5y ago
    ...and also, 40 years is not a long time for disease evolution. ...especially one like HIV which has a much lower transmission rate than a respiratory virus.
alecst 5y ago
I downvoted for an opinion-based answer. Yea generally viruses evolve to be less deadly and more infectious, that’s the trend (but certainly not a law), but the important thing is the time scale. Plus there are endemic viruses that are not benign. So this comment came across as a bit too confident. Feel free to expand on it.
- lambdaba 5y ago
  Didn't the Spanish Flu (which was way more virulent) basically evolve in this way?
  - manojlds 5y ago
    What about the original SARS?
    - rossdavidh 5y ago
      The original SARS had a much higher mortality rate, which meant that trace-and-isolate responses actually had a chance of working. The mortality rate of Covid-19 is nowhere near that of SARS, which actually allows it to kill more people in the end because it can spread stealthily, and no lockdown or trace-and-isolate has worked. There are also more reports of animal reservoirs for Covid-19 than for SARS.
      - erhk 5y ago
        It also didn't incubate the same way
    - mongol 5y ago
      SARS really seems like a bullet we should be lucky we have dodged
      - erhk 5y ago
        No, it was never possible for original SARS to have r0 comprobale to nCov19. However that was the fear from the start.
Pyramus 5y ago
I think it's a key point to mention that it's more that the hosts will evolve, i.e. develop immunity or die off, rather than the virus. The virus will continue to mutate but mutation activity is invariant to lethality (up to a certain point where lethality precludes transmission - where SARS-Cov-2 is far away from). In fact, because there is a correlation between viral load and lethality, the virus will actually get less benign on average in the short term.
jhpankow 5y ago
Or as TFA speculates: an endemic virus like the flu that kills 10k-60k in the US every year.
codehawke 5y ago
What if it evolves into SARS?
- KaiserPro 5y ago
  SARS is simpler because people become sicker quicker and don't spread it about anywhere near as much.
api 5y ago
The virus will evolve so as to make more copies of the virus. This can go more than one way. The viral evolutionary definition of benign is "does not kill the host or harm the host in such a way as to greatly reduce its ability to spread the virus." Making the host brutally ill and totally non-functional for weeks is generally fine. Causing harm to the host that reduces its vitality or life span in the long term is fine. Polio met these criteria. It did not usually kill its host. Benign is only one evolutionary path though. Another evolutionary path for a virus is to boost the R factor so high that it can burn through its hosts and still find more hosts, especially if there are say... seven to eight billion hosts. Smallpox was more like this. A more contagious form of Ebola could be like this.
nradov 5y ago
It's not that the virus will necessarily evolve to become benign, but rather that most people will get infected when they're young and build up natural immunity which protects them later in life. This is what already happens with the other 4 endemic common cold coronaviruses. Each of them probably killed a lot of people when they first emerged. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7252012/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7252012/
- Pyramus 5y ago
  This is the correct answer and should be highlighted more. The virus doesn't evolve to become benign, it's the hosts that will evolve. In addition to the endemic coronaviruses that you stated, another example are endemic/seasonal influenza strains vs. new strains. (Yes the virus will evolve but in general mutations will optimise for transmission and be indifferent to lethality.)
  - peteradio 5y ago
    It seems like lethality can become a first order evolutionary driver though by turning our focus on it and quickly smothering any "hot" virus but allowing "warm" virus to spread. Can't humans play a part in the evolutionary process of the virus?
    - Pyramus 5y ago
      In theory yes - and that's what's happening in many countries. E.g. in Germany there is a differentiation between high risk areas and virus variant areas, with different testing and quarantine protocols etc. However on a global scale only some countries are sequencing some of the time, and only in humans (with ad-hoc exceptions)! Which is simply not enough.
    - erhk 5y ago
      We cant stop it from spreading during its asymptomatic phase.
  - lamontcg 5y ago

How do you know? HIV hasn't evolved to be any less deadly in the 40 years it has been around. Instead, there's most excellent treatment available and people have changed their behaviour.

oblio 5y ago
We'll probably do a bunch of these. Vaccines, treatment for the worst symptoms and potentially treatment against the virus itself. I think we're working on all these fronts. I wonder how much we'll change/have to change our behavior long term, for example 10 years from now. I'd imagine not much.
- HarryHirsch 5y ago
  I wonder how much we'll change/have to change our behavior long term, for example 10 years from now. I'd imagine not much. I'd say it's the exact opposite. It's known that immunity against coronaviruses isn't long-lasting (look at the Rev Jackson and his wife, both of whom were vaccinated early this year and are now in hospital) and that antiviral treatment needs to start early (does everyone really want to do a PCR test every other day so they can start antibody treatment early like Governor Abbot?) We'll have to start wearing masks indoor and stop being in crowded rooms until the virus is eradicated. Right now, with the population half vaccinated, we are setting ourselves up for a re-run of Marek's disease, this time in people.
  - oblio 5y ago
    What we should do and what we'll do will be very different. 5 years of reduced socialization will turn a large percentage of the population into nervous wrecks.
  - ilammy 5y ago
    > until the virus is eradicated But doesn't COVID have animal reservoirs? If it does, good luck vaccinating all the bats and monkeys of the world. Or what's the plan there? Wait until the virus has subsided “enough”, then... what exactly? Still be on guard 24/7/365/4, paranoidally testing each and every traveler, ready to quench a cluster formed around some volunteer returning from a distant part of the world?
    - HarryHirsch 5y ago
      Nonpharmaceutical interventions work pretty good. Plague is endemic in rodents in the Western US, there are actually a dozen human cases every year, but there aren't epidemics because we do rodent-proofing. Rabies has an animal reservoir, but we vaccinate our dogs. Honestly, I don't understand the appeal of the ostrich strategy. Vaccination rates in Florida and Illinois are similar but in Florida, where they pretend Covid doesn't exist, the only thing they get is overflowing hospitals.
      - ilammy 5y ago
        I'm more talking about some humans getting infected somewhere, then bringing it in from wherever they were, where precautions are lower than where you came from. The way I see it, the long-term route is treating COVID like, say, malaria. You would get your vaccine when you travel places. Doctors would know what to test for based on your symptoms. But still, the contagiousness here is radically different. By the time you get to see your doctor, you could have infected dozens of people. So the most effective strategy is still isolation and pervasive testing? IDK, I guess we will just have to sit there and see where we'll be with COVID in 5 years from now. Maybe the virus will really just get bored and go away (unlikely). If not, maybe people will get bored of being freaked out and more comfortable with the thought that electing a new government won't eradicate the virus but you can build more hospitals and keep getting your yearly COVID booster shots.
        erhk 5y ago
        Maybe if the chinese keep their same lockdown and close their border indefinitely, or maybe for new zealand this is the case but for countries in the EU and NA the cats out of the bag and it wont ever be eradicated. I dont know who told you eradication was still an option but it stopped being one in feburary of 2020 when nCov19 started commmunal spreading. This. Does not. Go. Away.
  - erhk 5y ago
    If we got every human being vaccinated with a 100% efficacious vaccine for all strains at the exact same time globally without pause then MAYBE eradication would be feasible. Eradication is a fever dream, did you bother to read the attached article?
RegBarclay 5y ago
HIV is a different family of viruses, so the comparison to the corona family of viruses doesn't apply.
- erhk 5y ago
  Excuse me?
manojlds 5y ago
HIV is what it is because of its type. If all viruses are like that we probably won't exist or would have evolved to fight it better.
argvargc 5y ago
And despite killing ten times as many people as COVID, these changes were achieved without destroying small businesses and jobs, plunging millions into poverty (and likely later starvation), gross human rights violations and police brutality, and reintroduction of segregation into previously free democratic societies. (Just like with all other communicable diseases of modern times.) Go us.
- SketchySeaBeast 5y ago
  > And despite killing ten times as many people as COVID That's an INCREDIBLY disingenuous comparison considering that COVID-19 has been with us for less than two years. And, though I object to your characterization of said measures, extreme measures weren't taken because you couldn't catch it just via proximity. Also important to point out one big similarity - denial of both was used to dehumanize swathes of the population who were especially vulnerable.
  - argvargc 5y ago
    Not really, at the rate death is declining overall COVID will almost certainly kill far fewer in the same timeframe. And given differences in policy, and differences in resistance to them have not resulted in any discernible difference in result (ie, it's wild mess that makes no sense and more typically returns results opposite to expectation), it largely appears this would have been the case had we not ruined everything over it.
    - SketchySeaBeast 5y ago
      > Not really, at the rate death is declining overall COVID will almost certainly kill far fewer in the same timeframe. Looking at Google's worldwide deaths I don't see much of a decline. Sure, it's down from a peak, but it's actually on the way back up. What data are you using for that assumption that deaths are on the decline? > And given differences in policy, and differences in resistance to them have not resulted in any discernible difference in result South Korea, with a population of 51.71 million, is currently sitting at just over 2,000 deaths. Do you believe it to be sheer chance that their deaths are so low when compared to America?
mrfox321 5y ago
HIV has evolved to be less deadly: https://www.pnas.org/content/111/50/E5393 https://www.pnas.org/content/111/50/E5393
- q1w2 5y ago
  ...and also, 40 years is not a long time for disease evolution. ...especially one like HIV which has a much lower transmission rate than a respiratory virus.

alecst 5y ago

I downvoted for an opinion-based answer. Yea generally viruses evolve to be less deadly and more infectious, that’s the trend (but certainly not a law), but the important thing is the time scale. Plus there are endemic viruses that are not benign. So this comment came across as a bit too confident. Feel free to expand on it.

lambdaba 5y ago
Didn't the Spanish Flu (which was way more virulent) basically evolve in this way?
- manojlds 5y ago
  What about the original SARS?
  - rossdavidh 5y ago
    The original SARS had a much higher mortality rate, which meant that trace-and-isolate responses actually had a chance of working. The mortality rate of Covid-19 is nowhere near that of SARS, which actually allows it to kill more people in the end because it can spread stealthily, and no lockdown or trace-and-isolate has worked. There are also more reports of animal reservoirs for Covid-19 than for SARS.
    - erhk 5y ago
      It also didn't incubate the same way
  - mongol 5y ago
    SARS really seems like a bullet we should be lucky we have dodged
    - erhk 5y ago
      No, it was never possible for original SARS to have r0 comprobale to nCov19. However that was the fear from the start.

Pyramus 5y ago

I think it's a key point to mention that it's more that the hosts will evolve, i.e. develop immunity or die off, rather than the virus. The virus will continue to mutate but mutation activity is invariant to lethality (up to a certain point where lethality precludes transmission - where SARS-Cov-2 is far away from). In fact, because there is a correlation between viral load and lethality, the virus will actually get less benign on average in the short term.

jhpankow 5y ago

Or as TFA speculates: an endemic virus like the flu that kills 10k-60k in the US every year.

codehawke 5y ago

What if it evolves into SARS?

KaiserPro 5y ago
SARS is simpler because people become sicker quicker and don't spread it about anywhere near as much.

api 5y ago

The virus will evolve so as to make more copies of the virus. This can go more than one way. The viral evolutionary definition of benign is "does not kill the host or harm the host in such a way as to greatly reduce its ability to spread the virus." Making the host brutally ill and totally non-functional for weeks is generally fine. Causing harm to the host that reduces its vitality or life span in the long term is fine. Polio met these criteria. It did not usually kill its host. Benign is only one evolutionary path though. Another evolutionary path for a virus is to boost the R factor so high that it can burn through its hosts and still find more hosts, especially if there are say... seven to eight billion hosts. Smallpox was more like this. A more contagious form of Ebola could be like this.

nradov 5y ago

It's not that the virus will necessarily evolve to become benign, but rather that most people will get infected when they're young and build up natural immunity which protects them later in life. This is what already happens with the other 4 endemic common cold coronaviruses. Each of them probably killed a lot of people when they first emerged. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7252012/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7252012/

Pyramus 5y ago
This is the correct answer and should be highlighted more. The virus doesn't evolve to become benign, it's the hosts that will evolve. In addition to the endemic coronaviruses that you stated, another example are endemic/seasonal influenza strains vs. new strains. (Yes the virus will evolve but in general mutations will optimise for transmission and be indifferent to lethality.)
- peteradio 5y ago
  It seems like lethality can become a first order evolutionary driver though by turning our focus on it and quickly smothering any "hot" virus but allowing "warm" virus to spread. Can't humans play a part in the evolutionary process of the virus?
  - Pyramus 5y ago
    In theory yes - and that's what's happening in many countries. E.g. in Germany there is a differentiation between high risk areas and virus variant areas, with different testing and quarantine protocols etc. However on a global scale only some countries are sequencing some of the time, and only in humans (with ad-hoc exceptions)! Which is simply not enough.
  - erhk 5y ago
    We cant stop it from spreading during its asymptomatic phase.
- lamontcg 5y ago