@realcaseyrollins

Nevermind now that someone else replied I am seeing the thread (oddly even when i went to your status on your own server I didnt see full thread).

Anyway WRT to "the more deadly it is the less chance it is to be a pandemic".. the answer is, sorta, it depends on what you mean by deadly.

These things are never as simple as a single sentance and the disease models can get rather complex, but in simple terms, it depends on what "more deadly" really means in context. For example let's say a virus has a 1% chance of killing you, but the death occurs after the infectious period (which is quite common, many viruses you stop being contagious **before** the symptoms are serious or deadly)... now lets say all of a sudden it mutates and everythign remains the same except now 100% of the people who get it die.

Obviously common sense will tell you, since the death occurs after the infectious period, that it will have no effect on how quickly the virus spreads. Aside from being more deadly it is just as infectious as it was before.

However it also means you can never reach herd immunity if everyone is dieing instead of building up an immunity, but that also means your population is decreasing quickly and lower population density means a slower progression of the virus, so the effect of all those people dieing is infact it becomes less of an epidemic in terms of pure numbers just because there are fewer people to infect at all (and the ones left presumably have higher natural immunities as they are the last to catch it)..

So in short... it depends, there are scenarios where it can be more deadly and be less of a pandemic too, for example lets say it used to be 1% deadly and the death always occured **before** the infectious period (allowing 99% of people to spread it once they get it), if the death rate were instead 100% then people would die before becoming infectious and thus the disease wouldn't spread.

So yea, basically, it depends and there are no sweeping statements one could make as simple as "more deadly means less virulent"

@josias@theres.life @arh@toots.alirezahayati.com