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A (possible) solution to Covid-19

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Re: A (possible) solution to Covid-19

#91

Post by coconut_crab »

jbermudes wrote: post #12

I'm glad people are realizing that all this social distancing is merely a pause button on the virus. Once we press play on society, exponential growth will happen again and we will have effectively rolled back the clock until we reach herd immunity through things like the OP's suggestion. At least this next time we'll hopefully have more PPE.

(I am not a professional, so what I write below might be wrong)

Having more time to develop a vaccine or effective treatments is essential, it doesn't have to be herd immunity. Plus in countries where covid19 rate is low enough, social distancing can be helpful for finding and isolating clusters to suppress the epidemic.

Re: A (possible) solution to Covid-19

#92

Post by robocat »

danieltillett wrote: post #31
jka wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thank you. I certainly get the sense from the article and your comments that you are well-informed. My suggestion is really one around building trust - it'd help to have others in the same scientific field confirm and/or question the approach.

This is exactly what I want to do. I want to collaborate with those in the position to go looking for one of these attenuated viruses.

It looks like you need to find someone who can help make your post feel more professional - perhaps Ask HN for help or just directly email one of the clued up people here that are open to cold emails (patio11?).

I almost didn’t read it because the title sounds too generically woowoo, and the domain you are using seemed unprofessional. Then on reading the article, you didn’t give your background, an irrelevant picture of a painting opens the article, and the sidebar of your article topics are all over the shop. Sorry for being so negative: it is much easier to find reasons why something doesn’t feel right, and I’m not a fantastic marketer so I can’t offer you fixes I could predict would help.

It seems like a really good idea (are there others that have suggested it?), but I suspect it needs to be more convincing with a bit of repackaging if you want to push it.

Maybe add comments to those 2 papers with an “elevator pitch” or a request for other relevant info, and link to an improved post, and it should bubble up and find the right people to evaluate it.

Edit: also perhaps get your idea onto the various Covid daily link sites: good ideas should bubble up. Use Twitter to relevant people. Pass the idea to this guy who writes fantastically and has audience: https://medium.com/@tomaspueyo/coronavirus-act-today-or-peop...

Good luck, we need some!

Re: A (possible) solution to Covid-19

#93

Post by Lordarminius »

danieltillett wrote: post #89
londons_explore wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You probably won't find that... You might find a strain where 99.9% of people get a mild case. Who is going to be the person to recommend deliberately spreading that strain to the world population, knowing that 0.1% of the world, 7 million people, will end up in a hospital and die? Sure, overall, fewer people might die, but the reality is whichever world leader makes that call has effectively just signed a death warr…

I think we can do better than 0.1% death rate. In principle there is no reason we can’t find a strain that is no more dangerous than the coronaviruses that cause the common cold. One thing is certain and that is unless we go out and look we won’t find anything.

@danieltillett

I could quickly put together a team focused on southern Nigeria and Ghana to find through word of mouth, medical records, contact tracing lists and social media, people who have experienced covid-19 symptoms and are likely to have had the disease. My team would also collect samples from people in the worst affected areas who are asymptomatic. In this way, we could collect data and enough samples to isolate a(?the) virus if any.

Do you know any organisations that could provide funding and support for this ?

Re: A (possible) solution to Covid-19

#94

Post by danieltillett »

choeger wrote: post #84
danieltillett wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are no stupid questions, just stupid politicians. We are looking for an attenuated strain and that will be found in people with a mild case. We could sequence all cases, but we would exclude any strain that puts someone in hospital so it is a waste of resources to sequence viruses from people in hospital. From a practical perspective it is better to concentrate on people with only mild cases.

But honestly, if you only look into people with mild cases, how do you know the virus causes these mildness? If I pick 1k people with mild cases at random, I will find pretty much any strain that currently is in circulation. How do I know which strain is harmless?

You don’t, but what you are looking for is a virus with a largish deletion in an essential gene. You then go and look for anyone in contact with this person and check them and then expand out to the whole local area. If everyone infected with this strain has a mild illness they you have hit the jackpot.

I do describe this in my blog post.

Re: A (possible) solution to Covid-19

#96

Post by pezo1919 »

geomark wrote: post #79
nobrains wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is viral load, and doesn't it eventually become the same for everyone infected after some time during which the virus multiplies?

My understanding (not an expert) is that there is a difference depending how much of an initial dose of the virus you get. If it is very small then your immune system has more time to respond before the virus replicates to dangerously large numbers, whereas if your initial dose is large then you are starting with a large number of virus particles that replicate too fast for your immune system to respond.

Yeah I think it makes a lot of difference. See doctors at hospitals... even youngs pass out. (I think in a higher rate than usual.)

Re: A (possible) solution to Covid-19

#97

Post by ztjio »

bserfaty wrote: post #95

Can't the attenuated strain mutate back to a strong dangerous one after we spread it? (Hope this isn't a stupid question)

In theory any coronavirus could, including the 4 we consider absolutely harmless.

In fact, with existing attenuated virus approaches that eventually becomes the problem, the "last mile" of this approach usually sees you needing a real vaccine to cap off the disease. Otherwise the virus kinda circulates around in a tight enough cycle that you see most if not all eventual mutations including dangerous ones that kill. Communities using attenuated virus vaccination approaches for Polio faced this in recent times, for example. And it becomes a problem in places where you can't get people to afford or accept the real vaccine.

Anyway it's a tried/tested approach to solving a pathogen problem, so it's hardly some crazy idea this person has. They do point out the there will be specific types of mutations that are less likely to mutate back if you read the whole article.

Re: A (possible) solution to Covid-19

#98

Post by zxcmx »

danieltillett wrote: post #94
choeger wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But honestly, if you only look into people with mild cases, how do you know the virus causes these mildness? If I pick 1k people with mild cases at random, I will find pretty much any strain that currently is in circulation. How do I know which strain is harmless?

You don’t, but what you are looking for is a virus with a largish deletion in an essential gene. You then go and look for anyone in contact with this person and check them and then expand out to the whole local area. If everyone infected with this strain has a mild illness they you have hit the jackpot. I do describe this in my blog post.

I think GP's point was that if you have a candidate it would also make sense to use sequences from the hospitalised to try and confirm your strain didn't put them there.

Aka this being one mechanism by which you confirm it is only producing mild illness. There's a limited amount you can find out by asking because nobody knows what strain they had.

Re: A (possible) solution to Covid-19

#99

Post by Guthur »

coconut_crab wrote: post #91
jbermudes wrote: post #12

I'm glad people are realizing that all this social distancing is merely a pause button on the virus. Once we press play on society, exponential growth will happen again and we will have effectively rolled back the clock until we reach herd immunity through things like the OP's suggestion. At least this next time we'll hopefully have more PPE.

(I am not a professional, so what I write below might be wrong) Having more time to develop a vaccine or effective treatments is essential, it doesn't have to be herd immunity. Plus in countries where covid19 rate is low enough, social distancing can be helpful for finding and isolating clusters to suppress the epidemic.

Of course, there are two ways out of this, herd or vaccine. The above is a variation of herd that may result in less deaths.

The real problem is that waiting until a vaccine is just not even remotely realistic for so many reasons that it's not even funny. We could end up causing more indirect deaths with social isolation than we could possibly imagine, worst case being a huge collapse in the economy results in a large regional or global conflict.

Re: A (possible) solution to Covid-19

#100

Post by tilolebo »

jbermudes wrote: post #12

I'm glad people are realizing that all this social distancing is merely a pause button on the virus. Once we press play on society, exponential growth will happen again and we will have effectively rolled back the clock until we reach herd immunity through things like the OP's suggestion. At least this next time we'll hopefully have more PPE.

It's not a pause button, it's a playback speed button that slows down the contamination.

Remember #FlattenTheCurve.

What is true is that it would take waaaay longer to reach herd immunity this way.

Another thing that people usually get wrong is the her immunity concept: from what I understand, it doesn't mean we ALL need to be infected. We just need to be enough, so the virus can't spread anymore.

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