Variants, Oh No!
Variants Are Normal and also Driven by a Few Things
Variants are a NORMAL part of the viral lifecycle.
They arise for a multitude of reasons, but they are VERY normal for this subfamily of viruses.
Think about the flu and how the vaccine is updated yearly? That's because of variants. It's a similar virus type. It’s built similarly as well and behaves similarly.
Viruses don't want to kill their hosts.
They tend to be more virulent when they first jump species, but soon enough they chill out as they make their way through that species immune systems.
As the immune systems "see" and process the virus over and over they mellow out. This can take a while, but this is what nearly ALL viruses do.
DO NOT let the media scare you otherwise. There are very few cases of a virus causing MORE issues to the population over time. They nearly all become kinder and gentler, especially coronaviruses.
The common cold is due largely to 4 strains of coronavirus that likely started out as virulent and over time have come to chill out and turn into what we know as a “cold”.
Kinda like SARS COV2 has become with Omicron. It’s now a cold.
And yes, people die of the cold every year and we don’t lock the world down and mass vaccinate over it.
And YES! They DO become more infectious and transmittable. This makes sense, right? They don't want to go extinct by burning through their host population. They don't make it very far that way. They chill out and make their way even further through increased transmisability.
Think of Ebola. There is a reason it rarely gets off the continent of Africa, it makes it’s hosts VERY sick and kills them quickly.
Remember, at it's worst, this virus had an over 99% recovery rate for healthy people. And in a study in the Lancet of nearly 7 million people showed that 93% of people who've died from covid have been over the age of 60. Never making light of the situation, simply giving you the data.