>Not likely. Survival of the fittest for a virus usually means allowing the host to live longer - in other words LESS lethal.
Lethality is irrelevant to a virus, all that matters is the probability of transmission. Ebola is about as rapidly deadly as a virus can be and still be viable. The selection pressure is all on shedding large numbers of virus particle in all directions - there is no selection pressure on preventing you from dying.
So why does Ebola kill then? It is basically a side effect of its mechanisms of transmission. It diverts your body into producing an enormous number of viral particles and then makes your body “leaky” so that they are released into the environment to infect someone else. If you were to design a virus based on Ebola from scratch for maximum transmission in humans you would slow down the disease progression, but you would find it hard to remove the lethality.
Another way of thinking about Ebola is that the current strain is not at the local maximum for optimal transmission in humans as it kills too quickly. Any slow down in disease progression will cause the infectiousness in humans to increase. This is why this is something we should be worried about.
Lethality is irrelevant to a virus, all that matters is the probability of transmission. Ebola is about as rapidly deadly as a virus can be and still be viable. The selection pressure is all on shedding large numbers of virus particle in all directions - there is no selection pressure on preventing you from dying.
So why does Ebola kill then? It is basically a side effect of its mechanisms of transmission. It diverts your body into producing an enormous number of viral particles and then makes your body “leaky” so that they are released into the environment to infect someone else. If you were to design a virus based on Ebola from scratch for maximum transmission in humans you would slow down the disease progression, but you would find it hard to remove the lethality.
Another way of thinking about Ebola is that the current strain is not at the local maximum for optimal transmission in humans as it kills too quickly. Any slow down in disease progression will cause the infectiousness in humans to increase. This is why this is something we should be worried about.