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Originally Posted by cyclopathic
Is it deadlier than what we had seen so far is yet to be seen; most likely not viruses usually evolve to being less deadly and more contagious but we will know it soon.
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Virulence and infectiousness are not necessarily linked. There is no evolutionary pressure for Covid to become less deadly. Unlike some viruses (such as MERS - to which it is related - and Ebola), it doesn't kill 70-90% of those it infects. Such high kill rates do favour less deadly variants, because the host population isn't wiped out.
Covid is on average 1% fatal so there is no pressure on it to become less deadly. Its strongest weapon is its infectiousness, and the spike protein mutations have strengthened that weapon. The worry is they may help it escape the vaccines as well. Given that the spike proteins are the means it used to enter human cells and replicate, it seems likely to this layman that an increased viral load will result in more cellular damage. At this stage we don't really know, because the infections from Omicron are in the hundreds compared to the millions we have seen with Delta.
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