I totally missed it from the article but how is he going to tell the deadly strain from the less deadly one? I mean I understand how they can tell the difference between the two strains. But how to tell that some particular strain is less deadly? To the best of my understanding the only way to get there is to sequence the virus from statistically significant number (~10^5 ??) of carriers including the significant proportion of those with asymptomatic cases. Not realistic IMHO.
A (possible) solution to Covid-19
361–370 of 585 posts
Re: A (possible) solution to Covid-19
#362In one of the article comments there is an interesting suggestion on reviving the research on DRACO[1]: > In cell culture, DRACO was reported to have broad-spectrum efficacy against many infectious viruses, including dengue flavivirus, Amapari, and Tacaribe arenavirus, Guama bunyavirus, H1N1 influenza, and rhinovirus, and was additionally found effective against influenza in vivo in weanling mice. It was reported to…
Why did they choose indiegogo over traditional medical research funding?
Re: A (possible) solution to Covid-19
#363Earlier quoted context omitted.
I was responding to this from your blog post: > This data suggests a simple and testable hypothesis – there are natural strains of SARS-CoV-2 in the world that have mutated to be non-pathogenic (asymptomatic), but are still infective and will provide immunity to the more pathogenic (deadly) strains. From the structure of the post it sounded like "this data" referred to Iceland plus the Wuhan study. If you only meant…
Yes both. The Icelandic data suggests there is genetic diversity in SARS-CoV-2 and the Wuhan data suggests there are strains that are less pathogenic. There is also a Singapore study that has identified strains with large gene deletions, but I haven’t yet updated the post to include it [0]. 0. https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.03.11.987222v1....
Here’s a post from late February that enumerates 42 known strains of 2019-nCoV as a phylogenetic tree: https://nextstrain.org/narratives/ncov/sit-rep/2020-01-30?n=...
I’m a lay person here, but it seems a foregone conclusion that viruses experience frequent mutation, and that a novel virus infecting a new host species for the first time is going to see a relative explosion in mutations due to the extreme increase in the number of opportunities for it to occur.
Re: A (possible) solution to Covid-19
#364Perhaps a first step is to simulate a population where several variations of the virus exist, and where people set out to get infected by those who are believed to host a "safe" variation. What is the likelihood that interaction between the variations and people's mistaken beliefs screw this up?
Re: A (possible) solution to Covid-19
#365How do we know that a less deadly strain actually provides some immunity to a more deadly strain? That seems like an assumption here.
His assumption is based on live-attenuated vaccines. The measles vaccine being one of those. All the early vaccines where like that. The process only requires heat inactivation. So you end up with a dead or almost dead virus, which can't replicate anymore. Your immune system recognizes it as a foreign agent, makes antibodies to tag it for removal. Today we prefer to immunize with a part of the virus structure, which…
Still seems like an assumption until its tested/proven. I'd prefer a more evidence based approach, evidence from this virus.
Re: A (possible) solution to Covid-19
#366Earlier quoted context omitted.
>I live in a college area and young adults are still going over to each others apartments and without practicing social distancing when going out to buy groceries. That's my point: the young adults don't want to comply with the social distancing, so if someone said "hey, if you let me infect you with this virus that has a 1/50,000 chance of killing you, you can no longer get/transmit the more dangerous strain so you…
Why wouldn't they just say "no" and continue not social distancing?
They don't want to be fined? I thought in most places with a lockdown they're fining people who don't follow social distancing requirements.
Re: A (possible) solution to Covid-19
#367In one of the article comments there is an interesting suggestion on reviving the research on DRACO[1]: > In cell culture, DRACO was reported to have broad-spectrum efficacy against many infectious viruses, including dengue flavivirus, Amapari, and Tacaribe arenavirus, Guama bunyavirus, H1N1 influenza, and rhinovirus, and was additionally found effective against influenza in vivo in weanling mice. It was reported to…
Why did they choose indiegogo over traditional medical research funding?
Good question. I am even surprised why not Kickstarter - it's more suitable for the larger goals.
Re: A (possible) solution to Covid-19
#368> Singapore and Japan have recently seen this in action where they eased restrictions and found the disease came back and they had to reintroduce restrictions.
Poorly informed, Japan did not even have restrictions in the first place.
Re: A (possible) solution to Covid-19
#369"We have a choice of taking some small risk now, or face the certainty of a much worse problem later. Time to accept some risk and do something." Agreed 100%. What about simply letting the people who young and healthy or immune go about their lives? Letting the young and healthy get sick and then become immune is essentially using an attenuated human instead of an attenuated virus. Same outcome though. This would bot…
This was the UK government's plan until they realised just how many people would die as a result.
Thats false. The UK's plan was to not quarantine ANYone.
The young are basically immune to this.
I'm saying quarantine the vulnerable populations and let the healthy populations out.
Re: A (possible) solution to Covid-19
#370Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don’t see that any regulatory authority would approve something that is capable of spreading, regardless of the possible benefits: it would violate medical ethics. Reread the Belmont Report. There are many teams all over the world that are looking for less deadly (and more deadly!) strains to guide development of therapies. They’re too busy right now to post on message boards or speak to reporters. It’s however ext…
All the attenuated live viral vaccines spread. This is one of the reasons they are so effective since they keep herd immunity up. For example, every kid that gets the live polio vaccine spreads it around to their peers and parents.
> All the attenuated live viral vaccines spread.
Can you point me to sources supporting that claim? I searched myself, and what I found says that our knowledge is limited to the polio vaccine:
"Little attention has been given to vaccine transmission, possibly because transmission is rarely measured and largely unknown in humans except for the oral polio vaccine. Whether transmission is indeed rare for other live vaccines, or has merely gone unnoticed, is not clear – polio vaccine transmission is accompanied by evolution to high virulence, creating problems that draw attention to transmission."
From "Transmissible Viral Vaccines", James J. Bull et al., Trends in Microbiology, January 2018. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5777272/