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I'd say that's normally true, but there's not a ton of lockdowns with even Delta right now, so while I agree that it probably isn't going to get worse, there's

I'd say that's normally true, but there's not a ton of lockdowns with even Delta right now, so while I agree that it probably isn't going to get worse, there's still not a ton of pressure from social response as it is right now for it to get milder (maybe you could argue pressure from vaccines I guess).

daxfohl 5y ago
Yeah I think we can learn what society thinks is acceptable risk just by looking at death counts over the last two years. They've pretty much leveled out. So as the virus mutates into less (or more) harmful variations, we'll see the world react less (or more) strictly, but overall death count will remain stable.
- daxfohl 5y ago
  Presumably the steady state will happen after the virus mutates into a less dangerous variant (as infecting more people will be evolutionarily advantageous for the virus), and eventually we all get it and build up antibodies, at which point its virulence further subsides.
zamfi 5y ago
Sure, and this is where the immune erosion comes into play: as vaccination rates go up, so does selection pressure for immune erosion. Re: delta, think of this counterfactual — what would happen if a new variant appeared that is more lethal, more virulent, and that caused hospitalizations more quickly? You can bet the lockdowns would ratchet up. With Omicron, we didn’t even notice it until there was a random genome scan. Viral evolution rarely selects for host death — it’s just not useful as a goal. There’s also probably relatively weak selection pressure for symptoms, though probably casing sneezes in hosts helps with spread, it also acts as a signal that can cause the host to isolate and halt spread. (See: SARS v1.) From a selection pressure perspective, the ideal virus (among humans!) probably goes completely unnoticed for as long as possible. Humans won’t fight something they don’t even notice, and we probably have tons of these viruses everywhere and don’t even know about them.

daxfohl 5y ago

Yeah I think we can learn what society thinks is acceptable risk just by looking at death counts over the last two years. They've pretty much leveled out. So as the virus mutates into less (or more) harmful variations, we'll see the world react less (or more) strictly, but overall death count will remain stable.

daxfohl 5y ago
Presumably the steady state will happen after the virus mutates into a less dangerous variant (as infecting more people will be evolutionarily advantageous for the virus), and eventually we all get it and build up antibodies, at which point its virulence further subsides.

zamfi 5y ago

Sure, and this is where the immune erosion comes into play: as vaccination rates go up, so does selection pressure for immune erosion. Re: delta, think of this counterfactual — what would happen if a new variant appeared that is more lethal, more virulent, and that caused hospitalizations more quickly? You can bet the lockdowns would ratchet up. With Omicron, we didn’t even notice it until there was a random genome scan. Viral evolution rarely selects for host death — it’s just not useful as a goal. There’s also probably relatively weak selection pressure for symptoms, though probably casing sneezes in hosts helps with spread, it also acts as a signal that can cause the host to isolate and halt spread. (See: SARS v1.) From a selection pressure perspective, the ideal virus (among humans!) probably goes completely unnoticed for as long as possible. Humans won’t fight something they don’t even notice, and we probably have tons of these viruses everywhere and don’t even know about them.