You seem to forget the 75-200 million deaths it took to get to your happy sunny uplands with the plague.
You are 100% correct that 75-200 million people might die at 2% CFR over 7.9 billion people , but what does that have to do with "Air-travel and open borders eliminates natural selective pressures or evolution towards less virality"??? That is address the moral/ethical question which is an entirely separate conversation we are having, which is the scientific basis of evolution in a globalized society with open borders.
You are also forgetting the fundamental difference between covid and the bubonic plague which is the high mutation rate and proven re-infection capabilities of covid.
Yes, you are correct that Viruses have higher mutation rates than Bacteria, and Yes, you are correct that Higher mutation rates may result in higher probability of lethal strains, but nobody disputes this. Rather, it's whether a more virulent strain becomes the dominant form in circulation, or whether maladaptive mutations prevent it from becoming the dominant strain.
Also, FYI, Bubonic plague is proven for re-infection too. You can get re-infected by Bubonic plague after just a few months after infection.
The very example of Bubonic Plague proves that even exceptionally lethal pathogens with 90+% kill rates can spread far and wide even in medieval times.
Yes, but the whole "Air-line, Air-travel, Open Borders' bullshit is wrong.
Yes, they can co-exist, but the original question is whether evolutionary selective pressures exist in the age of air-travel, open borders, and transportation, not whether a virus can exhibit high virulence and still be transmissible. That was never even in dispute. After Bubonic Plague exhausted the entire human world population, it evolved to become less virulent (severe/harmful/deadly). It was never in dispute that high virulence and mediocre/high transmissibility can co-exists.
That means there is absolutely no evolutionary pressure for covid lethality to drop.
Using your logic, due to high mutation rates, high reinfection rate, and high transmissibility for COVID, there is no evolutionary pressure for Spanish Flu of 1918 to reduce in virulence (severe/harm/death)...... but it DID drop in virulence.
You can't say due to high mutate rates and high reinfection, there is no evolutionary pressure for reducing virulence (severe/harm/death), because Spanish Flu proves that you can reduce virulence....
It can rise to 90% and still be able to effectively spread before fundamentally undermining its own spread potential
Using your logic, high rates of mutations and high transmissibility (including re-infection) for Spanish Flu could allow virulence to rise to 90%....... but the exact opposite happened, the virulence actually REDUCED.
Again, it's whether a dominant strain will occur with high virulence, not whether mutates can possibly result in lethal variants (we know random mutations can occur with lethal strains), but whether the overall dominant representation is a highly lethal virus, just look to Spanish Flu to see the exact opposite occur, despite higher mutation and re-infection rates.
Sure, so now that you've shifted the limited available hosts to the entire human population on Earth. The only way the pathogen is going to evolve into a less virulent strain is when all the virulent strains die out with their hosts. How much of the population will be culled this way? 10%? 20%? 50%? 90%? Nobody knows.
Thank you, I am glad we are all on the same page on this issue.....Now if it becomes a moral/ethical question rather than a scientific question, I am glad to address this point as well (see below)
Sure, so now that you've shifted the limited available hosts to the entire human population on Earth. The only way the pathogen is going to evolve into a less virulent strain is when all the virulent strains die out with their hosts. How much of the population will be culled this way? 10%? 20%? 50%? 90%? Nobody knows.
If the Chinese population is 100% vaccinated (this is an important point), then there is exponentially less deaths, because even Chinese vaccines elicits an 85-95% protection against death.
- Coronavac: 86-98% protection against Death ()
- SinoPharm: 84-96% protection against Death. ()
So assuming if the Chinese population is 100% vaccinated, you have significantly less deaths compared to unvaccinated population. I'm not advocate for China to give up now, I'm saying once everyone vaccinated, with booster shots for new variants, perhaps you don't need forever lockdowns.
If the Chinese population is 100% vaccinated (this is an important point), then China can sustain Indian+American+European levels of infection (total) with only a fraction of total deaths, because 99.9% of Vaccinated people survive COVID-19.
Sounds to me you're saying in order for covid to evolve to be less lethal, a large chunk of the global population will need to die first.
Yeah, I think I'll go with China's approach for now.
No, I'm saying once everyone in China is 100% vaccinated, with annual booster shots for new variants, and deaths go down significantly due to mass vaccination, we can adopt the same strategy as we do against seasonal influenza.
I am not advocating for everyone to ignore vaccines and let the virus run wild? I'm saying once everyone is 100% vaccinated and boosters are available..... then you can adopt the seasonal flu strategy.
That's not really the point.
So your "air travel and open borders" theory somehow morphed into an moral/ethical question, rather than a scientific question. Got it.
The point is, if you're living in that jar, are you going to wait until the fire consumes all the oxygen and extinguish itself, by which time you're going to be dead, or are you going to put out that fire while it's still small?
This is a moral/ethical question, rather a scientific question.
A better analogy.
Fires consume oxygen, like virus consume humans.
Moisture, in the form of
humidity and precipitation, can slow the
fire down
and reduce it's intensity, or even eliminate the fire.... Just like Vaccines can slow transmission of virus, or even eliminate it via herd immunity.
So if everyone is vaccinated 100%, it's equivalent to raining which can extinguish the fire before it consumes all the oxygen.
Nope. The Bubonic plaque ended with the invention of Quarantines.
The Bubonic Plague never "ended", there is over 650 deaths every year, how can you say it "ended" when so many people still die each year.
Who the hell is Quarantining because of Bubonic Plague?
The Bubonic Plague did not become less lethal. In fact, any occurence of it is an immediate report to the CDC and the WHO.
Yes, Bubonic Plague did become
less virulent (severe/harm/death).
Evolutionary theory tells us that a pathogen that kills all its victims will eventually run out of victims, leading to its own extinction. The plague bacteria needed to evolve into something less virulent, and that seems to be what happened.A bug that doesn't kill its host is far more successful evolutionarily. (Just look at the common cold, which we can't seem to get rid of.)
Smallpox didn't become less lethal, neither did Diphtheria, Malaria and Dengue.
Smallpox get eradicated by vaccination.... completely different virus. Different virus have different characteristics unique to it.... for example, Smallpox and Polio can only infect humans and mutates relatively slowly, so a targeted mass vaccination can eradicate the disease.
COVID, like Spanish Flu or Bubonic plague, is much higher mutation rate than SmallPox or other diseases,
Delta variant is actually slightly more deadly than the "wild" form, so there is no trajectory to prove that it is becoming less lethal.
The Spanish Flu, H1N1 influenza, and Four Other Coronaviruses all evolved to become less deadly.
"As H1N1 moved geographically from the epicentre of the pandemic, the disease became less deadly. This is a general trend for viruses and is seen in that have made the leap to humans in recent centuries and now cause a quarter of all common colds. To work out whether covid-19 will follow a similar evolutionary trajectory, we need to understand why the virulence of a virus changes as it spreads.."
