Aren’t organisms trying to find the most hosts so it can have more chances to survive ? sure it would kill all its hosts in short time but organisms don’t rationalize like we do, so why won’t it seek to become way more transmissible ?
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Let’s ignore the anthropomorphic language here, and look at why HIV isn’t an airborne virus.
There’s lots of families of viruses, and they all tend to spread I’m different ways. Similarly, we’ve got different families of animals. Some fly, some walk, and some swim.
The viruses we’re most familiar with are the respiratory viruses because everyone gets those. You’ve got the flu and Covid, and all the viruses we just call a common cold. Those are flying viruses. They live and reproduce in the tissues that make up your respiratory system, so they spread by air. Their ancestors did it, and their ancestors’ ancestors did it.
Then you’ve got viruses that spread through blood. That’s where you got hepatitis, HIV, and a few STIs. Those are the swimming viruses. They like to stay in the blood, the lungs and nose just doesn’t do it for them. Their ancestors did it, and their ancestors’ ancestors did it.
Now viruses don’t really like to walk, but there’s a few bacteria that do. For the most part you’re only getting viruses the other two ways. You might cough up a virus and it’ll live outside for a bit, but it’s not their main groove.
Now we get to point where evolution doesn’t make giant jumps from swimming to flying. Given a few million generations it could happen, but even for viruses that’s a long time. All these families of viruses have had hundreds of thousands of years of evolution to get to where they are now, if not more. The common cold isn’t going to become an STI as much as HIV isn’t going to become airborne.
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