I’d feel a lot more comfortable with this line of reasoning if somebody could put numbers on it. This rhetoric makes sense, but is it rooted in reality?

What’s the expected rate of variant emergence under different scenarios? Can we get it down to near-zero, or are we talking like 30,000 escape variants to 30? Since it only takes one, clearly in the latter case further restrictions and mandates would be futile.

Somebody should be able to run simulations and come up with reasonable estimates.

If we had simulations that could tell us how contagious a disease would be just from its genome, that would be earth-shattering. But since we don't that's not really the sort of question a simulation can solve. But I think it should be concerning that at least two related coronaviruses (SARS and MERS) turned out to have very high fatality rates in humans.

I napkin mathed a rate of one notable strain every 100 million infections. The rates higher than one every billion. And lower than one per 10 million. Also read a paper that mentioned the idea that the reason people get reinfected by cold viruses every couple of years is because that's how long it takes the virus to evolve to escape immunity.

If you except roughly those numbers. If you got the infection rate down to 1 million / year. You'd see a new strain every 100 years. As it is we're seeing a new strain every couple of months.

It's just as likely, perhaps more likely, that it will mutate to a less deadly form.

Over the very long term. But that's because people who get more deadly forms tend not to create as many new cases on account of them being dead. The long term trend isn't very comforting for those people, I imagine.

Would slowing the spread through measures give it more opportunities to accumulate mutations that help it break through immunity and vaccines? I'm somewhat worried prevention efforts led to delta. The virus would have naturally spread fairly quickly, and alternate universe delta would have had to adapt to reinfect people who already have immunity. The delta we have was selected to spread, and now it's facing populations with no immunity.