Wouldn’t benefiting the host of the virus be better for the virus itself instead of destroying its host?
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Certainly it’s in the virus’s interests not to make us *so* sick that we die or isolate ourselves.
But it does still need to make and spread copies of itself, which is going to tend to be damaging. Unless it switches its replication strategy from “spread from host to host” to “remain where you are and just get copied when your host gets copied”.
Which–could happen. It could be argued that the human [IRGM](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IRGM) gene is (partially) descended from a virus that switched strategies. But once that happens, it’s not really a “virus” anymore, just a gene.
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