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I keep wondering what unintended consequences our nearly-unprecedented efforts on non-pharmaceutical interventions ("lockdown", social distancing, masks, etc.) might end up having on the virus - for example, could all our isolation and distancing be accidentally selecting for strains of the virus that transmit more readily over further distances?

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The mitigations are effective in slowing the spread (to varying degrees, due to a multitude of factors), which in turn slow down the rate of mutation. In any case, I would expect the dispersion of the virus to follow a pattern similar to https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=plVk4NVIUh8

Don't know about your country/region but here the mitigations are put in effect because hospitals can't handle the pressure anymore.

That will be a tough one to measure.

However measurement of the impact of lock-downs/social distancing upon existing known virus's like colds and flu's would give an insight into that whole area.

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