Brave The logic is pretty simple - the basic evolutionary requirement is to reproduce, and you select for immunity evasion rather than lethality, you can then infect a host over and over again and reproduce more often.
And that is consistent with how a lot of stuff we observe happening in evolution over long periods of time. So it does seem to fit the model.
There are, however, two issues with the theory, particularly as it applies to COVID-19.
Firstly if it were that simple, ALL infections would evolve to become less lethal but more immune evasive over time and we haven’t seen that. There are viruses that have been around for thousands of years that have never evolved to the point of being completely non-lethal. Cholera or similar is just as likely to kill you now if you get it as it as when the Pharaohs rules Egypt, assuming you don’t get treated. So it’s obviously not a ‘blanket’ rule.
Secondly, evolution is not a ‘smart’ process. There’s no.. guiding intelligence. There are plenty of forms of life we see in the fossil record that have, essentially, ended up as evolutionary cul de sacs because the adaptions to pressure that happened didn’t work out, or the situation they were adapting to changed while they were at it. The general drift of evolution is kind of obvious, but the path things take along it is… wiggly.
Basically, evolution is random in the short term (as in centuries) so we can’t rely on it to help us, but CV is patently very fast evolving so that effectively gives us more rolls of the dice to get a variant that may out compete all the others while being less damaging to the host.
To be honest, it’s interesting, but it’s mitigation measures, vaccines and successful treatments like Ronapreve that will get us past this, not evolution doing us a favour.
