Percy writes:
The last thing a respiratory virus wants to do is kill the host. A host that's no longer breathing is no longer seeding the air with virus spawn. So lethality is selected against. A host that is too sick to get out and about among other people is not very useful to the virus. Shut-aways or hospitalized people keep the virus from spreading. So making the host too sick is also selected against.
Your post reminded me of what I had read about parasites that alter the behavior of their hosts to increase their propagation (propagation of the parasite, not the host), as described in
this wikipedia article. This would explain the emergence of the vast number of anti-mask, anti-science, anti-vcxx, anti-mandate far right conservatives who want to
cancel or even execute any politician or health care professional who is trying to effectively deal with the Covid19 pandemic/epidemic.
Is the Covid vaccine also a vaccine against Republican wingnuttery?