Comments by "Titanium Rain" (@ChucksSEADnDEAD) on "Fauci on new Covid-19 strain found in UK: You have to assume it's here" video.

@itsAmeOFP 1st comment - You don't give it time. It burns through potential hosts before it can change. 2nd comment - By delaying the spread you created the conditions for the infectious agent to change. Not every mutation is beneficial. By widening the timeline you have created the conditions for natural selection to breed a strain that collected mutations beneficial for itself while less infectious strains become unable to jump from host to host. If it happened all at once, the different mutations would not have had natural selection and all the diverging strains would be similar enough to make people immune. With a naturally selected strain you increase the chance that immunity won't work because this new strain benefits from infecting people who were immune to the previous strain already, and thus it changed enough to evade. Think of a cancer. It's also playing by the rules of natural selection. Your immune system is primed to take out misbehaving cells. But a misbehaving cell that keeps itself hidden from the immune system will last longer and keep reproducing. So the cancer grows and the body is not primed to fight it because all that mass comes from cells that have adapted to stay undetected.
1
@itsAmeOFP "I don’t think actual time passed makes much of a difference" - But it does. If everyone was fighting off the infection at the same time it would burn itself out. Now that there's people who have been infected and recovered, we allowed it free reign to potentially recycle hosts as a new strain. "it’s the number of replications that increase the likelihood of a mutation" - Sure. But if the same mutations happen over a longer period of time you're always ensuring a pool of hosts to draw from. "Every additional host increases the chance of a mutated pathogen capable of circumventing antibodies/vaccines/etc, and/or increased contagiousness/lethality/long term damage" - But it's preferable for it to starve itself of available hosts. "you could have a scenario where any individual in the set of infected people could be the host of a mutated strain capable of circumventing antibodies" - But everything's going down at the same time. Now we're stuck in a loop where we'll stay in lockdown due to a new strain, then during lockdown the new strain gains a foothold, we have to go into lockdown again to control that one, rinse and repeat. Welcome to our new normal.
1
@SynterraSteen https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4XZ_jxBh-4c https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PRa6t_e7dgI
1