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@Martin. It is just simple maths. The more rolls of the die you have the greater your chance of a win. There is no intelligence behind it or motive - no narrative, if you like. Viruses mutate all the time. It cannot survive long without a host. The longer the virus is in the body, the more chance it will mutate and some of those mutations will be beneficial to the virus. The most successful mutations will fare best and come to dominate. The more bodies that are infected, the greater the chance a mutation will occur and spread. Arguably, hospitals could be the most probable location for a super-strain. Having patients on oxygen with very long lengths of stay with lots of similar patients all around them, all with immune systems struggling to keep up is the perfect brewing pot. Anything that can be done to keep people out of hospital, spread out, and reduce the length of time a person is infected will reduce the chance of a nasty mutation getting out into general circulation. Given how widespread the virus now is you could say it is inevitable that transmissibility will improve which leads to 2 possibilities - it becomes more deadly (although not too deadly or people are dead before they have a chance to infect others) or milder and becomes just another common cold. The latter may well end up being the default position even in the former scenario as any older people will die off and younger people exposed as children will have some memory of it and think it is just another cold. The question is how you manage for the next few years or even the next decade until equilibrium is established.

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