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A comment on Ant parasites that prolong the life of their host. Parent comment

Re:Ant parasites that prolong the life of their host by DFHippie on Thursday May 20, 2021 @05:46PM (#27227780)
The deadliness of a virus doesn't assist its spread. The deadliness doesn't make it more or less successful, everything else being equal, but usually dead hosts are hosts that don't continue to spread the virus, so things aren't equal. In most cases deadliness in viruses is selected out precisely in order to increase their spread.
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Re:Ant parasites that prolong the life of their host by trhway on Thursday May 20, 2021 @08:59PM (#27229357)
Deadliness of the virus is just a side effect of its fast spread - the major part of the spread is replication which damages the host. The virus is an optimization problem - replicate and spread as fast as you can as long as the associated host damage and deaths result in the spread decrease smaller than the gain from the replication intensity increase causing that damage and deaths.
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Re:Ant parasites that prolong the life of their host by haberman on Thursday May 20, 2021 @09:28PM (#27229533)
A game that you can play in simulation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plague_Inc.
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