re: #20 A Mom Anon

Add in more potent variants to open everything and it’s almost a guarantee of more death and sickness. I know a lot of people are hurting and needing income and some kind of normal, but we’re looking at more shutdowns. I’m just scared we won’t do that until we’re looking at another million or so dead. This is going to get worse before but gets better. I hope I am completely, totally and in every way wrong about all of this, I truly do.

Being more contagious is an advantage to a virus, being more deadly not so much. For one thing, it causes people to take precautions (and half the population is vaccinated, thus pretty much out of its “reach”), and for another it reduces its hosts’ ability to spread it — by incapacitating and/or killing killing them before they can go out and spread it.

The ideal virus is the one that infects everyone and has few or no symptoms. So a more contagious, asymptomatic covid would push out the delta variant and all its nastier cousins.