Not really. Evolution just causes viruses to optimise for their own spread.

Often that selection pressure works towards less dangerous variants because that gives them more opportunity to infect others.

Sometimes a virus kills off everyone who is susceptible to it. So it's now less dangerous to those who remain.

In the caae of Covid, it is infectious long before it kills, and so there is no great selection pressure for it to become less dangerous.

Not really. The virus, lacking feelings, doesn't particularly care how sick you get.

https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2021/dec/08/facebook-p...

In declaring the statement 'false', the Facebook fact checker confirmed there is a longstanding scientific theory it is true and provided confusing would-be counter-examples of variants of viruses exhibiting treatment resistance and cross-species leaps. Omicron demonstrated that treatment resistance is really incidental to severity, and COVID already is a problem for humans -- the question clearly was not asked by a pigeon or monkey for whom cross-species leaps of a human virus could be problematic. The would be fact check was not especially illuminating.

I personally credit the prediction attributed to Luc Montagnier back in 2020 that because COVID exhibited unnatural characteristics that exacerbated the severity of illness, he predicted that over time the characteristics would evolve out of the virus and result in a more benign illness. This is a reason why it would have been useful to have a scientific debate over the lab leak theory, because the origin of the virus informs our best guess of the path it may take in the future, which has so far confirmed to this prediction.

If you have an article or paper explaining how viruses evolve to be less severe, I'd be interested in reading it.

over <1yr time frame, severity hurts the virus spread. consuming resources and triggering sneezing etc does. Therefore random mutations tend toward mild severity (symptoms like sneezing, not instant death).

HIV is an interesting case because it is "just a flu" for a few weeks, then remains contagious but isn't severe at all, until it develops into AIDS years later.

Woah, this politifact.com fact check sorted that out. I had gotten really confused into thinking the virus did have feelings.

Thank you politifact.com political fact check fact check for checking that.

The article actually specifically endorses anthropomorphizing viruses, because "feelings" are just a human metaphor on top of real biologic and physical processes, as how water likes to flow downhill.

Apologies, the snark is mine not theirs. My point was that the evolutionary pressure on viruses doesn't necessarily make them less serious and there are counterexamples to support that.

Evolution is not about, or caused by, feelings.

> I thought the general theory of "virus evolution" was towards less severe variants.

That's probably only in the case where the disease is so severe it kills the host before it can spread very easily, not some general rule.

Let's say you have a virus that's super contagious for two weeks with no symptoms and nearly everyone who gets it dies within a month. What evolutionary pressure would it be under to change as long as it has fresh hosts to infect?