A (possible) solution to Covid-19

I posted and deleted a few comments. I don't know what to make of this and it's getting controversial. If it could be helpful, I'd love to improve it. I just don't know where it fits in ongoing discussions by prominent researchers on analysis of strains and types.

Three things that jump out at me:

a) You'll get more credibility from having a thorough lit review than from listing credentials. Linking to magazine articles from journalists on genetic variations, when there's academic research to cite, is a little bewildering.

b) You don't identify something harmless by just testing asymptomatics. This is counterintuitive, but a great example of the Wason selection task:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wason_selection_task

You would probably want to survey the rate of variants in asymptomatics in a certain community, then compare that with the rate of variants in fatal cases in the same community to look for significant differences (and be fully prepared not to find any significant differences beyond chance, a real and likely possibility).

c) I'm still not sure what the author is specifically recommending we do next. Researchers are looking for functional variants, we don't have one to distribute yet, so we should do more sequencing. Ok, great. From what populations? How many geographic areas? Where do we get the samples? There are bottlenecks in sample collection, how do we overcome those? Given (b), how can we get more samples from fatal cases, to compare virulence to those in the general population? Task overloaded hospitals to send us additional samples from dying patients? Is there another way we can get this info?

I don't want to dismiss this out of hand, this might be a good area for additional focused research. I do think there are some key unanswered questions though, and currently a worrying disconnect with the current state of research on variants.

EDIT: Daniel, I know you're going through the comments here, and some of them have gotten pretty harsh, sorry for that. I genuinely hope you're on to something, and are able to continue to refine the post into a more robust and specific proposal using all this feedback, despite the tenor of some of the comments. That's really the best case for all of us, so good luck.

Sorry if it's a stupid question, but hypothetically, would we be able to engineer rather than find a harmless strain of coronavirus with the spike protein of SARS-CoV-2?

If I understand correctly, antigens identify the virus by its S proteins. Would we be able to use the same methods as" rel="nofollow">https://www.nature.com/articles/nm.3985'>as in this paper to replace the S protein in a harmless cold-like coronavirus with the S protein of SARS-CoV-2, and would then the resulting immunity defend against SARS-CoV-2?

> This entire article is a waste of time from the beginning.

The moment I read that I lost my interest in his comment. Anything he is going to write afterward would not matter. He didn't gave sufficient reasons either why he thinks the article is a waste of time. We can safely ignore his opinion. Anyone who is directly reading GP's comment please read the article and decide for yourself.

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

He doesn’t seem to be arguing that a previously unidentified “asymptomatic strain” - or the effects of such - is currently known. If I understand his reasoning, he’s saying that it’s theoretically possible that a milder strain might exist, and that in order to find and isolate that strain (if it exists) we would need to be blanket testing people in outbreak areas, partitioning those samples by outcome, then sequencing the positive tests.

Once you have a set of sequences from positive tests from people who were and remained asymptomatic, then you can isolate the variants that lead to that and begin testing to see if any of those variants consistently present no (or very limited) symptoms AND confer immunity to the pathogenic strains of 2019-nCoV.

There's a lot of differences in risk appetite (and actual risk) from state to state.

Maybe the feds could allow states to get a waiver from FDA regulations if they want to try things like variolation.

This would still require someone at the federal level to stick their neck out a little, but (I think) a lot less than if they were to propose something like this as a federal policy.

We've got a federal system, let's make some use of it.