Re:Omicron at 100% Prevalence, Colorado
by spuz on Thursday January 06, 2022 @09:03AM
(#29823623)
Yes, I believe the high transmissibility before symptoms appear is the most beneficial trait to Omicron. However, if a variant appeared with exactly the same traits except that it was 10x more deadly, then a lot more people would be taking it more seriously, self-isolating and driving down infections. From an evolutionary perspective, there is an incentive for the virus to become milder rather than more deadly because of how the news of a deadly virus changes human behaviour.
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Re:Omicron at 100% Prevalence, Colorado
by bayesianbot on Thursday January 06, 2022 @10:11AM
(#29824459)
But future human actions do not put evolutionary pressure on the virus. First the possible new variant emerges, our actions come later.
It's not like strains of the virus are made by intelligent design. The point is that Omicron became dominant because people due to a lot of factors, its high transmissibility and people's disinterest in quarantining among them. If Omicron 2.0 came out with the same transmissibility, but a notably higher lethality, people's interest in quarantining would have increased significantly, which could have prevented Omicron becoming the dominant strain in spite of its increased transmissibility.