From the beginning, people have said that it's somewhat similar to some common cold viruses.

It is a common cold virus by now (look up “Evolutionary Dynamics of Viral Attenuation”), and I have been saying that for more than a year.

Really? How many people are hospitalized each year due to the common cold?

What the theory of "Evolutionary Dynamics of Viral Attenuation" implies is that a lot more people were dying of colds when it first entered the human race.

There is also mathematical evidence that compares the probabilistic error rates of COVID replication to the amount of mutations already encountered and it is looking good for us. COVID mutation rates are very high and most if not all have been encountered in humans. While some resist anti-bodies better it appears that none will do so entirely and thus COVID will devolve to a "common cold" as humans themselves are selected out (multi-generationally) for higher amounts of resistance.

It's basic biology in action.

It is important to remember that almost all diseases work this way (possibly ALL diseases if we could morally afford the extremely high death rates of some of them e.g., a 99.9% death rate for some diseases like rabies).

See sibling response, but also the answer to your question is “more than you would probably think”:

https://jcm.asm.org/content/48/8/2940

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4181476/

"By now"? Where is the evidence that SARS-CoV2 has decreased its severity through mutation?

Getting strong “15 days to flatten the curve” vibes.

There were, uh, people arguing, 12 months ago, that this characterization was bad:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22908490

Taiwan's had 1070 cases! And concerts and mostly normal life.

(do note that I'm not calling for endless lock downs there, I'm calling for control measures that we didn't really work very hard to put into place; we could have done a lot more to reduce household and workplace spread and so on)

“It’s just a tiny inconvenience, don’t be selfish!”

The only way I can interpret this is that you believe the cost-benefit is not there without a substantial altruistic motive. Do you think that, and if so, why?

Please don't take HN threads into flamewars. They're tedious and nasty, and we're trying for something different here.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

“It’s going to go away”