Correct me if I'm wrong, but from my understanding, if a novel virus mutates to be more infectious, it has to pay for it in other regards evolutionary speaking. Like it won't be as virulent or it won't be able to multiply as efficiently. Isnt that why most airborne viral disease tend to have Mild/moderate symptoms?
The most deadly types are usually transmitted through very close physical intimate contact or blood to blood exposure like hiv.
I mean yes a lot of people will still die but it won't be a civilization ending thing. I don't think any natural viruses are capable of that at least in our modern setting.
But I'm no expert.
You're describing a natural balance of infectious diseases, but as for the bolded, we've had plenty of major pandemics like the 1919 H1N1 outbreak that infected one third of the global population and had a mortality rate of 10%-20%. You don't need something with a stupid high mortality rate to cause social disruption, the fear isn't of "end of society" infections, but "disruption to society" where people can't go to work, health centers become understaffed, health workers become ill, containment (like in China) becomes used to stop the spread. It's easy to look at what's happening in China right now as something on your TV, but it doesn't take much of a thought experiment to ask "what if WHO recommends a quarantine of Boston?" and how that would fly in a western nation.
But yea, when you have people shitting blood and bleeding out of their eyes, that tends to sideline them and makes them less infectious to the population, even if the virus is still highly contagious from their own fluids and waste.
Which is the big fear of H5N1/H7N9(Bird Flu) is so monitored. It's jumped from bird -> human two decades ago(iirc) with a mortality rate of 15% (meta study analysis based on likely global unreported cases vs. official number of people who have died from H5N1/H7N9) to 60% (the known infection total vs official number of people who have died from H5N1). It's also jumped to pigs, and the general fear is since pigs are hosts to Human Flu, Swine Flu and now Avian Flu, it's a literal flu factory that can shit out a novel flu infection that has just the right genetic mix that makes it deadly to humans due to no immune response and infectious like Swine/Human flu.
And also, I'm not an expert either, this is just general knowledge and google-fu that I've done over the years.
Either way, I'm glad I'm getting my masks today lol
