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<blockquote data-quote="Thebrownblob" data-source="post: 5690437" data-attributes="member: 60485">[ATTACH=full]443738[/ATTACH]But a mutating virus might not necessarily be a specter of doom. “If you think about a virus, what’s the purpose? What’s the virus trying to do?” asks <a href="https://cos.northeastern.edu/people/jared-auclair/#_ga=2.168145889.177647070.1692933433-182751338.1692933433" target="_blank">Jared Auclair</a>, who is an associate teaching professor of chemistry and chemical biology at Northeastern, leads the Biopharmaceutical Analysis Training Lab, and runs the university’s COVID-19 testing facility, the Life Sciences Testing Center in Burlington, Massachusetts.&nbsp; It’s trying to stay alive, he says. And “if the virus kills someone, if it kills the host, it dies with the host. So it totally defeats the purpose.”Because the goal of a virus is to survive, replicate, and spread, it tends to evolve toward being more infectious and less deadly. There are exceptions and other factors, but in general, says Auclair, that’s what virologists expect to see occur with SARS-CoV-2, the coronavirus that causes COVID-19.</blockquote>

[QUOTE="Thebrownblob, post: 5690437, member: 60485"] [ATTACH type="full"]443738[/ATTACH] But a mutating virus might not necessarily be a specter of doom. “If you think about a virus, what’s the purpose? What’s the virus trying to do?” asks [URL='https://cos.northeastern.edu/people/jared-auclair/#_ga=2.168145889.177647070.1692933433-182751338.1692933433'][B]Jared Auclair[/B][/URL], who is an associate teaching professor of chemistry and chemical biology at Northeastern, leads the Biopharmaceutical Analysis Training Lab, and runs the university’s COVID-19 testing facility, the Life Sciences Testing Center in Burlington, Massachusetts. It’s trying to stay alive, he says. And “if the virus kills someone, if it kills the host, it dies with the host. So it totally defeats the purpose.” Because the goal of a virus is to survive, replicate, and spread, it tends to evolve toward being more infectious and less deadly. There are exceptions and other factors, but in general, says Auclair, that’s what virologists expect to see occur with SARS-CoV-2, the coronavirus that causes COVID-19. [/QUOTE]

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