>>13707289It would be a heavily controlled prescription drug only given out by doctors when someone is in a quarantined ICU setting. You're "probably" right but it should not make a difference since the spread is eliminated by 99.9%. They could pass it on to a nurse, but that is pretty rare. I think the increase in the gradient of variant production over time would be offset by this. The worse variants would die in the immune system of the patient, or die with the patient, and never spread.
I put probably in quotes above bc if the rate of neutral mutations to deleterious mutations could offset the whole thing by itself. Suppose patient A had the pill and patient B did not, both of their bodies tried to produce a viral load of 10 million virions. Patient A took pill and killed 50% of the load due to copying errors, which killed enough to end up with neutral mutations at 1%. B had no virions killed by the pill but 2% of the 10 million have neutral mutations. Thus patient B has more opportunities for dangerous mutations to arise despite the pill causing so many more wacky mutations.
The increase in variant production therefore is dependent on the fine-tuning of how likely the pill kills via copying errors vs producing "leftover neutral copying errors/mutations" ... and then compare those "leftover mutations" to the neutral mutations in someone who doesn't take the pill. I'm pretty sure the "leftover mutations" in patient A would be higher than the normally-expected mutations in patient B so your concern would be correct, but I'm not positive. It's really just a feeling actually. If the pill seriously destroyed the virus DNA every time from copying errors then there would be no concern because A<B in terms of neutral variants.
