You're missing the point because the media (and their pharmaceutical advertisers) have framed everything in terms of vaccination, as if the human immune system is incapable of surviving COVID and it's variants.
All viruses get less lethal as time goes on, not stronger, despite all the fear porn that has been indoctrinated into the public over the last year and a half.
Certain viruses maintained their lethality as time went on. Smallpox was very lethal throughout time. Influenza lethality ebbs throughout history. I don't think we can or should depend on less-lethal, common-cold-like symptoms from Covid-19 at any point.
SARS-CoV-2 does cause common cold like symptoms in the vast majority of cases, just like other coronaviruses. In particular it's quite similar to HCoV-OC43. The only reason those other endemic coronaviruses don't kill many people is that most of us get infected as children and build up some immunity.
There actually is. The evolutionary selection pressure on most coronaviruses exists throughout its infectious stage. So in order to be more infectious for longer the coronavirus would become less symptomatic and so less serious.
But with C19 we are aggressively isolating people with symptoms. This focuses evolutionary selection pressure on the initial infectious stage. In order to be more infectious the virus increases viral load and shedding, causing more serious symptoms; which would be an evolutionary disadvantage, except isolation renders this disadvantage moot.
Also natural immunity general focuses on the nucleus of the virus, vaccine immunity is to the spike. So this forces mutations in different proteins, which has different results.
Highly-deadly diseases will kill their hosts quickly, limiting their spread. Therefore, one of two things will happen:
• A less-deadly variant will emerge, spread faster, and outcompete its more deadly cousin.
• The deadly disease will kill enough of the population that its R number drops below 1, and thus the deadly disease will die out.
Therefore, observed diseases will tend to get less deadly over time.
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If you look at the data, we're firmly in “kill enough of the population” town (to the extent you can stretch this model to our situation). The variants we're seeing spread are getting more virulent over time, not less, because:
• we don't want to die and we're doing stuff about that, meaning any model with “most individuals infected are removed from the model” in it is a flawed model; and
• we have fast long-distance travel, so any population model that relies on Euclidean locality is a flawed model.
Here's the thing: even if the virus is less lethal, if it results in more hospitalizations, we are headed for lockdown again if hospital capacity starts getting threatened: all of the routine heart attack, stroke, laceration/crush emergencies we need to deal with routinely will be unable to find adequate care if anti-vaccine holdouts are storming the hospitals for ventilators, or even just inpatient observation. And if our politicians responsibly do lock down to head this off, they probably STILL won't understand how the power was in their own hands to stop it. Businesses will shutter again, kids will miss even more school, and the hospitality industry will again stumble because people refused to understand that even a small number of non lethal hospitalizations spread over the entire population is enough to overwhelm healthcare infrastructure.
> All viruses get less lethal as time goes on, not stronger.
Wrong. It's generally the case, because a virus that keeps its host walking around will tend to infect more people than a virus that sends them straight to the morgue.
SARS-Cov-2 is unusual in that it's asymptomatic infectious period is really quite long. It's straight-to-morgue capabilities could become much more prevalent with hitting its infectivity too badly.
All viruses get less lethal as time goes on, not stronger, despite all the fear porn that has been indoctrinated into the public over the last year and a half.