Wouldn’t benefiting the host of the virus be better for the virus itself instead of destroying its host?
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Viruses _are_ helpful. Not on an individual scale, maybe, but viruses are the primary way for genetic information to travel between species, which increases genetic diversity and helps foster evolution over long periods.
It’s also good to remember that bacteria does not affect all species equally. Deadly diseases happen when a virus that isn’t harmful to its usual host ends up infecting a member of a different species. Generally, viruses aren’t designed to kill their hosts, because when the host dies, that virus can’t keep spreading. But when a virus migrates to a new species, it doesn’t know how to keep its new host alive.
So, what ends up happening is that the virus ends up killing as it spreads. Some of the people it spreads to survive, and build up resistance. The virus adapts as it learns to live and spread in its new host species. The surviving hosts reproduce, and a new generation is born with a stronger immune system than the last. The virus, meanwhile, continues to spread until it either dies out, learns to keep its hosts alive, or crosses into yet another species to repeat the process from the beginning.
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