Summary
Despite new variants like XEC, Covid-19 appears milder, with fewer hospitalizations and severe cases, even though infections remain widespread.
Experts attribute this to improved population immunity from repeated infections and vaccinations, which blunt the virus’s effects.
XEC’s immune evasion has not caused a significant surge, and symptoms now resemble mild colds for most.
However, risks like long Covid and potential severe variants persist, emphasizing the need for continued vaccinations and research on better treatments and vaccines, including mucosal and universal options, to manage the virus’s unpredictable evolution.
When I was digging into this stuff a few years ago, what appeared to matter most was transmission and immune evasion. Whether or not the host died was irrelevant if the virus was spreading before the host showed any symptoms. Which is what we saw in 2020 and 2021. High transmission rates and high mortality rates.
However, viruses evolve over time and our immune systems can adapt to new threats over time. With COVID, there’s an inverse relationship with transmission and immune evasion. As people’s immune systems were able to recognize the virus, the variants that evolved to avoided (or delay) an immune response were the successful ones. Because of that inverse relationship those variants were also less successful at transmission.
Other factors like the ability to damage the lungs, damage to the sense of smell, etc. are essentially irrelevant if they don’t improve a virus’s ability to replicate and transmit. If they aren’t being used then they will disappear over time.
Which appears to be what we are seeing now. A virus that has evolved to survive long enough in humans to replicate and transmit while evolution has culled the features that don’t improve survival.