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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Umbran" data-source="post: 8676451" data-attributes="member: 177">"Scientists" is non-specific.  Which scientists?We can say that covid-19 deaths are down, no question.  But "lethality" is not a function of just the virus.  It is a combination of the virus and several other factors.For instance - at this point, somewhere between 60% and 75% of the US has been infected with some covid-19 variant.  Most of the rest got vaccinated.  The number of people in the US who are neither vaccinated, nor have had the disease, is very small - small enough to not be able to sample.  Drop in lethality of the disease may not be so much a function of the disease as it is a function of there being widespread resistance. (Johns Hopkins University: "The reduced severity of Omicron could also be attributed in part to increased vaccination coverage and recovery immunity")In addition to growing human resistance, we now have effective antiviral drugs against covid-19, reduced case numbers have moved hospitals back from the brink of overloading, and doctors now have far more experience managing the disease than earlier in the pandemic.  When we then look at mortality rates, it is incredibly difficult to untangle these effects.  Attributing this solely to the virus being less deadly is... well, in science, this might be called "naïve", meaning it is a simplistic take on the situation.Edit to add:  Indeed, coronaviruses have been causing something like 20% of common colds for decades (likely centuries if not millennia).  The fact that we now have deadly covid-19 rather puts to bed the idea that virus development dependably trends towards lowered lethality - if that were the case, covid-19 wouldn't have happened at all!</blockquote>

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