[Petrochemicals]

Review your concept of the social norm. It has changed considerably in the last 50 years.

The repression of social interaction during COVID lockdowns had no effect on birthrate in the UK. 

Point stands, majority of the  genes removed from the gene pool will belong to the people concerned with corona.

[alancalverd]

A bizarre supposition. Or perhaps just badly expressed.

The entirety of those killed by COVID (or indeed any disease) will be those who are susceptible to it.

Those people who are concerned about a disease will generally avoid contact with it or take some prophylactic or remedial measures, thus reducing the incidence or severity within that group.

UK COVID statistics are heavily biassed by the Secretary of State for Health's decision to kill nursing home residents early in the pandemic.

[paul cotter]

Bored chemist asked why I consider it "unlikely......". Viruses and their hosts tend to co-exist in peace(for the want of a better term) after some time of mutual contact. It is no benefit to a virus for it's host to be killed as this is of little use for spreading. Those clades of the virus that are most transmissible coupled with minimum harm to the host will in general be the most numerous and will outcompete others. This already appears to be happening with covid. None of this is absolute and a genetic shift could cause mayhem. What really worries me is the propensity of influenza to suddenly change to a highly lethal pathogen: it has done it before and it's only a matter of time before it happens again. 

[Bored chemist]

Bored chemist asked why I consider it "unlikely......". Viruses and their hosts tend to co-exist in peace(for the want of a better term) after some time of mutual contact. It is no benefit to a virus for it's host to be killed as this is of little use for spreading. Those clades of the virus that are most transmissible coupled with minimum harm to the host will in general be the most numerous and will outcompete others. This already appears to be happening with covid. None of this is absolute and a genetic shift could cause mayhem. What really worries me is the propensity of influenza to suddenly change to a highly lethal pathogen: it has done it before and it's only a matter of time before it happens again. 

That's a common belief but it misses the mechanism.
A virus doesn't become less virulent by stopping to consider its ways.

It does it because a nasty strain dies out because it killed all its hosts.
That's not actually good news for people.

There's no "deliberate" direction of travel towards a less dangerous virus, and, in the short term, there's every chance that a variant will be more pathogenic.

And it is under phenomenal evolutionary pressure to "learn" to evade the vaccinations.

[SeanB]

Exactly, the ones most likely to die are weeded out. Either by dying, or because, by deliberate exposure to a vaccine, they now have a much improved immune response. Either way they adapted to it, and having a vaccine is a way to be on the not pushing up daisies curve. Here the majority of those dying are those who refused the vaccine, for various reasons, so yes natural selection at work. Currently the vast majority of those who were hospitalised were the unvaccinated, the ones who got one or more of the various vaccines survived with only minimal medical attention, though it has done a rather terrible amount of work in other transmissible endemic diseases, where they have been left on the back burner due to the big pandemic, and there the transmission and treatment have been very much out of the attention of any form of control. Unfortunately being either immune compromised, or with a infection that targets the lungs, the pandemic has been rather much damaging there.

[paul cotter]

Bored chemist, I partly agree and partly disagree. Yes there is no deliberate drive in any direction, all changes arise from random transcription errors and a couple of base changes could alter characteristics dramatically. What I am saying is that over time the characteristics that include high infectivity+minimal host damage will be most favoured from simple evolutionary principles. A small number of our common cold viruses are corona viruses and it is thought that these may have been similar to covid originally and have evolved to be less pathogenic. However I am just saying what I think is probable, it could still all go pear-shaped .

[Petrochemicals]

Bored chemist, I partly agree and partly disagree. Yes there is no deliberate drive in any direction, all changes arise from random transcription errors and a couple of base changes could alter characteristics dramatically. What I am saying is that over time the characteristics that include high infectivity+minimal host damage will be most favoured from simple evolutionary principles. A small number of our common cold viruses are corona viruses and it is thought that these may have been similar to covid originally and have evolved to be less pathogenic. However I am just saying what I think is probable, it could still all go pear-shaped .

Mutations have largely been touted as toward the more transmissible less lethal end of the spectrum. I am no expert but that is statistically the progress they make. As for the evolutionary path they take the lethality is not a factor I would think is most divisive, as seen with monkey pox a disease that does not cripple the host or have visible symptoms spreads better than one where the victim is a sickly invilid with repulsive pustules on their face. As to why they evolve to less lethal, I am unsure, smallpox aids etc do not seem to have followed this path.

[SeanB]

So long as the virus, bacterium can grow or replicate, and have a spread that includes more new hosts it will do so. The mutations that allow it to do so without killing the host outright do however with time come more common, simply because they are the ones that allow the host organism to also survive long enough to recreate itself. The more virulent ones kill off all the hosts and die out, limiting their spread.

[acsinuk (OP)]

Sean,
That really is good news, so there can never be a serious pandemic as it will kill itself off naturally.
On reflection then should the world have panicked on news of Covid 19 when the evidence from the diamond princess cruise ship known within 2 months was that only 80% of the 4,500 passengers and staff fell ill and in the end only 11 all but 2 older people died???

[alancalverd]

Sean's comment is only partially true. If an agent can infect a second host before the first becomes clinically symptomatic, it will flourish. That is the problem with COVID, several STDs, and potentially with monkeypox.

In the case of COVID, once the Secretary of State had ordained that he be infected it was the host's late immune response that killed him, and by the time clinical symptoms appeared each infected person could have infected several others.

Whether you blame the Benign Creator or evolution, that's how successful organisms from the common cold to the Nazi party do it.

[SeanB]

Sean,
That really is good news, so there can never be a serious pandemic as it will kill itself off naturally.
On reflection then should the world have panicked on news of Covid 19 when the evidence from the diamond princess cruise ship known within 2 months was that only 80% of the 4,500 passengers and staff fell ill and in the end only 11 all but 2 older people died???

Well, eventually with a severe pandemic most of the host population do eventually die away, laving only a very small number left who either survived it, or were naturally immune. No further spread because now the host population is more or less 99% gone, leaving only a tiny part left. Pandemics do eventually die out, often simply because there are no more hosts around, and both infection and host are no more, limiting the pandemic. Sucks if you are the host, but in the overall life of the planet, merely a blip in a 4 billion year plus cycle of events.

Might not even leave a long term fossil record either, as after all very few things get fossilised in great numbers, except for the most common fossil of them all, banded iron ore, a fossil of the greatest environmental catastrophe that ever was on the planet, in that it literally changed the composition of all the surface materials more or less permanently, and there are only a very few descendants of survivors of the previous inhabitants around.