From COVID-era discussions (when virologists were briefly the stars of every talk show) I remember one explaining that it was less about fatality rates per se and more about the length of time you could carry the virus around and be nearly asymptomatic while still able to infect others.

I understand the jury is still out on whether a virus can be considered "alive" but, like us, it is capable of replicating itself and mutating. In that sense, it benefits from the same evolution strategies as more complex beings: a strain that gets its host very sick very quickly gets a lower chance to spread to a new host and multiply.

This creates an evolutionary advantage for strains of that virus that are less aggressive or at least develop the worst symptoms more slowly and more covertly.

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cogman10 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Yeah. HIV is a good example of this. Without treatment, it is deadly pretty much 100% of the time. However, it takes a long time after the shut down of the immune system before a systematic infection takes over and kills you.

That allowed for a deadly disease that's somewhat hard to spread (mostly just through sex) to ultimately go on a rampage.

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AbstractH24 an hour ago | parent [-]

I never thought about this.

So without concern for the humans with HIV* there an argument to be made that treating symptoms without curing made it spread more?

*obviously, this is just hypothetical. It’s important to care about the life of those with HIV. No banish them all to something like a leper-colony. Although it explains the logic for those at the time they existed better than a religious one did.

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cogman10 an hour ago | parent | next [-]

HIV specifically targets the immune system. There's no way to just treat the symptoms.

The treatments we have now also decrease the risk of spread significantly.

It's a bit like the chickenpox. Once infected, you always have chickenpox ready to burst out in the future as shingles. But for the most part, it's dormant and you aren't infectious.

HIV treatment does the same. It doesn't clear your body of HIV, but it does decrease the HIV load to such low levels that it can be undetectable. That, in turn, decreases the likelihood you'll spread it.

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AbstractH24 an hour ago | parent [-]

These are relatively recent advances. But for the longest time wasn’t that case.

	▲	cogman10 19 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		HIV has only really been known for ~40 years. And for at least 10 to 15 of those years research into treatment was limited and stigmatized as it was considered a "gay disease". The modern treatment regime was developed around 2010. That is, about 15 years. I'd argue that with the timeline of the disease that's not recent. What's become more recent is the mass availability of treatment and the significantly reduced cost of treatment.

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marcosdumay an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

> So without concern for the humans with HIV* there an argument to be made that treating symptoms without curing made it spread more?

No, because HIV treatment is about killing the virus, and we don't have any that only treats the symptoms.

But there is an argument like that for the flu and colds.

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bookofjoe 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

>I understand the jury is still out on whether a virus can be considered "alive"

I remember way back in med school in the mid-70s our infectious disease professor asking this same question, in a philosophical as much as a mechanistic sense.