“Viruses didn’t evolve to harm their hosts – in fact they depend on a living host to replicate, and that’s exactly what they do: find a suitable host and live there, replicating benignly, until the host dies of natural causes. These reservoir hosts, as scientists refer to them, essentially carry a virus without any symptoms. For example, ticks carry Rocky Mountain spotted fever; field mice, hantavirus; mosquitoes, West Nile virus, Yellow fever and Dengue fever; pigs and chickens, flu.”
