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Originally Posted by Iowa_Flames_Fan
I’m not an expert either, but have family who are in the medical profession, and my understanding from them is this is a myth. I found out because I expressed the same position you just did and was firmly corrected by people who know better than I do.
And it makes sense. Mutations are random; there is not likely to be any tendency for a virus to “weaken” in an epidemiological sense over time.
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I'm not a professional, just an armchair analyst. But I think the causality is backwards in that argument. There are reason 2 main reasons that virus's can tend to less dangerous overtime is that our immune systems learn and prepare for similar infections(it's why vaccines work), and viruses that extremely dangerous can burn through the reachable population too quickly.
So while mutations are random, small mutations will lead to faster adaptation of the immune system, and natural selection tends towards virus's that have a good balance between transmissibility and severity. These are more effects of other processes and not rules that say virus have to safer over time