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Comment by rossdavidh | Hacker News Reader

1) if people with mild or no symptoms keep moving among the population, but people with severe symptoms stay at home, then there would be a strong evolutionary pressure to cause milder symptoms

2) "dead people don't spread viruses"...UNLESS it's a zombie virus

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Your 1) only matters if transmission is related to symptoms. If the virus is transmissible for a while before the symptoms like Covid, symptom severity matters less (pre-symptom R-value gains outweigh post-symptom R-value losses). Reductively, if you’ve already infected your social circle pre-symptoms, what happens next is much less relevant to the virus’ lifecycle.

Even if symptoms don't impact transmission directly, if you're out circulating in the population (as opposed to self-isolating or in the hospital), you'll be able to infect more people.

Unless, of course, self-isolation or quarantine are entirely ineffective, which is not totally out of the question but I think people staying at home probably do spread it at least a bit less than people headed to the grocery store.

The mildness or severity of symptoms is determined after the period of maximum contagiousness.

What you are talking about sounds nice in theory but it doesn’t really add up based on how this virus works. If anything there is a pretty strong argument the other way… a more contagious version of covid will probably have a higher viral load and this probably lead to higher chance of serious disease be (like delta).

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