The rona is still rising

A quick Google search for "coronavirus dashboard" brings up some not-so-great news. Taken nationally, figures are nearly half of what they were at the peak, and three or so times what they were this time last year. Some places, especially the ones that are harder hit than last year, are seeing smaller rises, or even a steady pace of new infection. That was with Delta, and no one knows what Mu is going to do. Coronavirus mutation rates are significantly higher than previously thought, and vaccines and natural immunity seem to lose their effectiveness with each new variant. This makes sense, given that antibodies can recognize one virus structure and may be less effective at locking on to others. Keep the analogy simple, work a jigsaw puzzle sometime and have a piece that looks like it should fit, but doesn't quite really fit. You can push it down and sort of make it work, but you know it's not really right. Viruses and antibodies work sort of the same way. An antibody trained to recognize one type of virus might be able to latch on to a variant, but maybe not with full efficiency or even at all.

Viruses mutate all the time, but most of the time, those mutations are not successful. Either they don't offer any advantage over extent viruses in terms of how they spread, they mutate in an unsustainable fashion, they are too similar to the existing virus and are attacked by antibodies, or cannot bind effectively to the host cell type it normally does. As an aside, this does raise an interesting question if the wide array of symptoms and severity with covid might reflect small, transient mutations. However, if a strain mutates that is dissimilar enough to the existing strain, then it may make the jump to being a "successful" (from the virus' standpoint) mutation. Given enough events, billions of which happen with viruses at any given moment, a possible outcome is going to become a probable one. Therefore, it is likely that covid will continue to mutate.

Viruses that persist and cause great disruption must also hit a sweet spot between contagiousness and lethality. Ebola tends to burn itself out because it is too deadly to survive and spread for long. The common cold on the other hand is something that no one worries much about, because it is ubiquitous and is very unlikely to kill anyone. From a purely evolutionary standpoint, there is no advantage to a virus causing the death of its host - this is incidental at best, and problematic at worst. On the other hand, if there is a long enough period between the time the host is no longer in a position to transmit it (dead or isolated), then the virus has no reason to select for less lethality.

Right now, we're clearly in a period where covid has evolved to do quite well for itself in terms of spread, without really having any issues with finding hosts. Worse, the usual expectations that come with things like the flu (where it is seasonal and generally dies off in the population before the next season) isn't happening. So, in short, we have a virus that keeps modifying itself through natural selection in response to pressure from immune systems, is just lethal enough to cause major problems, and may or may not be effectively battled by our own immune systems or vaccines, which causes a death rate much higher than the flu, and causes major disruptions in daily life.

Civilizations enter a crisis when they are forced to deal with conditions that have a large impact, but cannot be adequately dealt with. Coronavirus is such a thing. On a micro scale, it may or may not be deadly to the people around you, some of whom might have gotten it or survived. Or, some may have died. These are atomic events. On a macro scale, the pressure that it puts on a civilization - not unlike selection pressures placed on the virus itself as it spreads - cause in aggregate a change in the direction and behavior of that civilization itself. We have seen the rejection of the scientific process by large portions of the country, of "magical thinking" with unproven remedies replacing modern medicine, and so on. It took most of human history to overcome superstition and to bring forth the idea of the scientific method. Will it take only a few years for it to be completely rejected again?