121–130 of 585 posts
Daniel, Why can’t we use the virulent strain but in extremely small quantity? Like 1/1000 of the typical viral load?
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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It is not really my style to boast about myself, but yes I should at least provide a link to the about me page.
Sort of a weird ask, but as a real, no shit, virologist, what do you think about changing your messaging to make content more accessible to lazy readers? I have some half baked ideas about tradeoffs in infection rate and fatality, but I'm worse than a layman, I'm a layman with an opinion. I'd sorta thought a virus could be real lethal(like ebola) ore real infectious(like a cold) but it's kinda hard to be both at the…
In general the less deadly viruses spread better as dead people are not able to spread the virus around as well as living people. The general trend is for viruses to become less deadly over time, but it can take a long time for this to happen.
Daniel, Why can’t we use the virulent strain but in extremely small quantity? Like 1/1000 of the typical viral load?
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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.
I've been thinking about this a few days ago when I went into the wikipedia rabbit hole about vaccinations and inoculation. A few questions: - How about the dengue fever scenario? (Immunity to less pathogenic strain can cause more severe reaction with a different strain). Can we asses the risk somehow? > Apart from the time it will take to develop, trial, and mass produce a vaccine (12-18 months), it is unlikely that…
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'd much rather live in a world where everyone is required to wear masks all the time than live in a world where we are all told to stay home all the time. I believe it's also well established that any measures taken to slow the spread of a new virus will always result in fewer total deaths, in that sense quarantining is much more effective than just being a pause button.
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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.
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. C…
This problem is easy to avoid these days.
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>What we really want is a strain that has infected a whole lot of people and all of them have had a mild case How about 10 to 50 million ? I live in Nigeria. Between December and late February, many people in Nigeria and Ghana report experiencing symptoms similar to those that could be caused moderate COVID-19 infection. These included, fever, diarhoea, cough, sore throat, malaise. Many physicians and scientists I kn…
The median age in Nigeria is 18.4 years, while in Italy it's 45.5 years. Nigeria might have more immunocompromised people due to AIDS. But is there any reliable accounting of deaths, much less the reason? In any case, I wouldn't be surprised if age and lack of accounting is why you don't see a problem in Nigeria. Source: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_median_...
2. The demographic profile and phylogenetic makeup of Nigeria is similar to Cameroon which has experienced more cases and deaths than Nigeria in both absolute numbers and on a pro-rata basis. This makes some of us believe we are dealing with two different circulating strains in both countries.
3. It definitely is the case that testing is not adequate but a highly susceptible affected population would soon be revealed by the number of symptomatic cases and, (more to the point), deaths. Both indices have remained relatively low