Think about this. Wouldn’t every virus morph into something unrecognizable to our immune system? All of this hype is about something very different than what occurs in nature, or it is exaggerated and distorted information. It just doesn’t happen naturally.
You're viewing a single comment thread. View all comments, or full comment thread.
Comments (169)
sorted by:
They do. They don't matter.
That being said, zoonotic viruses haven't settled into an optimized variant range for their new hosts so at first they can bounce around a bit more if they have enough hosts and replication opportunities.
So while it's perfectly normal for a virus that just jumped hosts to have multiple variants of sufficient divesity to qualify them phenotypically, that phase doesn't last long and they quickly settle in. The examples of more deadly evolutionary dead ends that burn themselves out, but scare people along the way ("omg he was so healthy! He was an athlete, he was young!") are long past. Now we just have the same minor variations. Delta is not the second letter in the greek alphabet, but it's the first one they are trying to push because they need to.
The reality is that regardless of what virus you are, chicken pox, fluv, corona, being deadly simply isn't a successful reproduction strategy in the age of hygene so that's not where they end up.