Wouldn't doing minimal remedial efforts, as you suggested, have allowed the most dangerous strain an easier ability to spread, thus slowing down the mutation time to a less dangerous strain? I am not an expert, and I slept at home last night, but wouldn't that be the impact of no or minimal remediation efforts?
No. You have it backwards, a couple of times.
If by remedial efforts you mean masks, distancing, etc... that would made it harder for the original strain to spread, not easier.
But if the original strain is spreading more easily, it now inhabits more hosts and there are more sum total little viruses out there, each of which will replicate and have a very small chance of mutating. One could argue that faster spread decreases the time to mutation.
What you really look at it is not time to mutation, but infections to mutation, to measure the overall impact. Allowing unfettered spread would mean that the mutations happen faster and also that the population would develop some immunity. You could argue that shortens the overall time span of the pandemic, but that's not free.
Having the pandemic burn out faster costs a lot of lives, in multiple ways. All the while the pandemic is raging, big pharma is developing vaccines, which when rolled out, will reduce mortality. And unfettered early spread would have a larger impact on the hospital system, meaning less ability to treat people who would recover, and people with non-COVID needs of hospital services.
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