>The natural life cycle of any virus is for it to become more infectious and less dangerous to the hosts since that's the best way for the virus to survive.

That's not really true.

>As evidence mounts that the omicron variant is less deadly than prior COVID-19 strains, one oft-cited explanation is that viruses always evolve to become less virulent over time.
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>The problem, experts say, is that this theory has been soundly debunked.

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And in my comment, I did not distinguish case numbers vs. case severity. I said "until/unless covid starts to fall below background common cold status." I'm sorry that you read it that way.

Its still out there but changed into a new strain or outcompeted by others. In those that caught it, much like most harmful bacteria it may live in or on them and could make them sick of they get seriously injured in another way and their immune system is unable to fight enough of the various invaders

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We are definitely a lot better at recognizing and treating illnesses these days. We have drugs to mitigate infection vectors (eg cough syrup prevents coughing, a massive transmission vector, decongestants limit mucus production so you're not sneezing snot everywhere), we have drugs to treat dangerous symptoms (anti pyretic drugs to prevent high fevers, repository drugs to prevent failure), and just much better overall awareness of how viral infections work and spread.

The latest is that a combo vaccine will not be available for this fall. I would expect a split option to remain available for some time, what with states like ID and MO considering bans on mRNA vaccines. Darwin chuckles.

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Delta waned because it got outcompeted by Omicron. Omicron is way more infectious, better at evading immunity/vaccines, and since it’s less harmful and deadly, societies don’t tend to lock down as much during waves of it. Natural selection has spoken, unless something drastic like an Omicron-specific vaccine drastically changes the equation before Delta goes extinct.

This is probably not a question you should ask strangers on the internet. But my belief is that I have gotten my last booster, and same is true for most people, unless they have some other medical reasons, and unless something else changes this is now just over.

We are down to a rate of 10 cases per 100000 people, so it will just slowly die out from here on, or worst case just linger on forever as a mild illness you can risk to get together with a million other mild illnesses we never cared to do much about.

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Out of curiosity if H1N1 Spanish Flu == H1N1 Swine Flu, why was Swine Flu so much less virulent? The Spanish Flu was particularly deadly among younger people and no young people would have been exposed to the extinct Spanish Flu.

(I Had H1N1 and it was awwwwwffullll, but didn't shut the world down like Covid or Spanish Flu).

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EDIT: They're not the same:

>The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said Friday the swine flu virus appears to be about as contagious as the average seasonal flu. In examining the virus, it also did not find the genes they think made the infamous 1918 flu so deadly.
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>https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=103728922

Edit edit:

>Model to Explain the 1918 Mortality Patterns.
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>Elderly individuals may have been protected from the 1918 virus by childhood exposure to an H1N1-like virus (5). We estimate that H1 and the H2 + H5 lineage diverged from a common ancestor near the time of the 1830 pandemic (SI Appendix, SI Text and Figs. S13 and S14). Moreover, protection was clearly greatest in those born before 1834 (5) (Fig. 3A), implicating the 1830–1833 pandemic virus, which would have primed the majority of that age group. If an H1-like virus emerged in 1830, it would likely have been positioned near one of the orange stars close to the root of the tree in SI Appendix, Fig. S13. Those primed as children between 1830 and 1889 by this HA lineage would likely have had considerable protection against the 1918 HA, comparable to that exhibited during the 2009 H1N1 pandemic by those born before 1957 (32), based on the similar genetic distances separating the childhood and pandemic virus HA in each case

https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1324197111#supplementary-materials

The tree here would indicate that H1N1 like Covid just continued to evolve and become endemic, it didn't die out. Nowhere is it claimed that the genomes are the same. In fact as the CDC mentions, we had a full sequence by 2005 of the 1918 flu and it didn't match.

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Variants are the evolutionary response to immunity, once people's immune system is exposed to it, it's very unlikely it comes back, as the strains that mutate are the ones that manage to spread.

This is why the flu will never go away, there's no winning against evolution, only playing catchup.

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Just to follow up on the re-emergence question. Here's a fun fact about the original Influenza epidemic we call the Spanish Flu; H1N1: It actually died out, once.

Partially from its own mortality rate, partially from built up immunities over time and evolving variants, but by the time we understood what viruses really were and how to approach them, there was no known surviving sample of it.

Before it died out, though, it passed on, first into the birds as H1N2, swapping out one bit for another, and again into pigs as H3N1, which themselves eventually crossed and produced H3N2, but enough mutations and variations kept the base nodes on infrequent rotation over the years. And eventually they met and hot swapped again, giving us the "Novel" influenza virus we called Swine Flu, H1N1.

And at some point, someone found an inexplicably well preserved vial of blood containing the Spanish Flu from back in the early 1900s, and tested it, confirming suspicions that yes indeed, through a series of exchanged hands, swine flu was a perfect re-assembly of the original Spanish Flu strain of influenza.

Tl;Dr - re-emergence is entirely possible even when the given strain has already gone extinct. Blind mutation and hot swapped component parts can always put Humpty Dumpty back together again.

One extract, with several links you may also be interested in. When I find the article I'm looking for I will edit this post with it

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/36091963/

Not the article I was looking for, it was not in Nature I'm sure about that however this one says more or less what I remember and is from about the right time, 2017.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-017-12726-4

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So does the more infectious strain just basically outcompete the less infectious ones, and prevent the latter from even actually infecting the person?

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I’d be interested in that :) please and thank you 😊