A (possible) solution to Covid-19

> Aren’t most people who have mild/asymptomatic cases infected with a dangerous strain?

> Yes. Almost all (>99.9%) of people who are infected (and have a mild case) are infected with a dangerous strain of the virus, they just happen to have an immune system that can control the virus well. With COVID-19 a mild case does not mean you are infected with an attenuated strain – for most people with a mild case if they happen to infect a person with preexisting conditions or who is old, that person will be at a high risk of dying. A mild case does not equal a harmless strain.

Even if the weak-strain hypothesis holds water (which remains to be seen), the proposal is predicated on something that's physically impossible to do. Test large numbers of people. Hundreds of millions or even billions.

Then, given those tests, find the weak strains.

That's also the minimum needed to "re-open" the country.

If we could test 20-30% of the population, we'd be in great shape. But we can't and may not ever be able to.

Even if you can test that many, you've got to prove that the weak strain is harmless. Then you've got to figure out how to administer doses safely.

So the solution must work within those parameters. And the only practical option is a vaccine.

> The major risk is the virus we think is safe is not 100% safe. While we can use community spread of the identified strain to estimate how safe it will be (i.e. if it has infected 1000 people and none have got seriously ill then we should have a pretty good idea that it is safe), but our knowledge will be incomplete. We can of course spend the next few years testing and trialling, but if we do this by the time any strain is shown to be 99.999% safe (not even the polio vaccine is 100% safe) we will have all got COVID-19 and the world’s economy will be a smoking ruin.

This guy is absolutely bonkers, or pulling a Swift.

He's proposing the (forced?) infection of a large portion of the population with a live virus that has been through none of the safety protocols established over many decades of catastrophic failures.

This is not how drug testing works. This is not how public health works. This is not how you assess safety. This is not ethical.

This is tech bro medicine at its absolute worst.

Spread rate would also need to stay in a certain range for a virus to stick around. Spread too fast and there won't be a second wave. The herd immunity effect gives this system some self-balancing properties, but there's surely a tipping point where even that won't help a speeding virus to survive.

Safety data can be gained from epidemiology studies. There is more than one way to work out if a treatment is safe and effective.

Not exactly, but the rebuttal includes:

"As of 2nd March 2020, there are 111 nonsynonymous mutations that have been identified in the outbreak, these have been catalogued here in the CoV-GLUE resource 504 and can be visualised in Figure 1. At current, there is no evidence that any of these 111 mutations have any significance in a functional context of within-host infections or transmission rates."

The premise that there is an "asymptomatic strain" is still theoretically possible but unsubstantiated, despite ongoing investigation.

> "I can’t believe that a month later, this bad science is still being circulated, by a purported PhD and former professor. "

That strikes me as a bit harsh, given that the posted article doesn't actually rely on two-strain to make its case, just the idea of functional variants possibly being out there somewhere. MacLean's rebuttal didn't definitely exclude the possibility that there's some functional variants out there somewhere, we just don't know, haven't seen it in anything we've catalogued so far.

Science is often about calibration. I wouldn't say a search for functional variants is completely worthless. That's why researchers continue to look at variants. On the other hand, completely agree it's overselling to pitch this as a silver bullet for the whole crisis though. Research can be important even when it doesn't solve for everything.

I can’t believe you think I am arguing for the “two strain” theory. My proposal has absolutely zero to do with two strains.