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A (possible) solution to Covid-19

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Re: A (possible) solution to Covid-19

#201

Post by dpratt71 »

weakstrain wrote: post #196

The author is thinking that reversing a deleted zone mutation is hard, but it could be that a simple mutation of the weak strain make it deadly, so my question is: can you guarantee that a new mutation is not going to make this strain deadly?, also the more people with the new strain of the virus, the more the bad mutation could happen. So I suggest looking for a strain for which we have a mean of killing the virus,…

There are no guarantees in life, but the reason we don't have global pandemics constantly is that mutations that make a virus as dangerous as SARS-Cov-2 are quite rare.

Re: A (possible) solution to Covid-19

#202

Post by nicoburns »

jimktrains2 wrote: post #182
foobarbecue wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Has this ever happened in humans? I haven't been able to find an example.

Isn't this why there is a 1918-related flu outbreak every generation and why bubonic plauge used to recurved every generation because there aren't immune?

I think bubonic plague is bacterial, and was solved with antibiotics.

Re: A (possible) solution to Covid-19

#203

Post by danieltillett »

rmu09 wrote: post #193

The results of a study in austria with 1500 randomly selected citizens have just been published, just 5 have been found to be currently infected with SARS-CoV2. The conclusion is that the prevalence of asymptomatic cases is about 0,32%, CL95 is 0,12-0,76%. Link (in german): https://www.sora.at/nc/news-presse/news/news-einzelansicht/n...

We are really more interested in mild cases, not asymptomatic cases. The evidence seems to be that most asymptomatic infections go on to show some symptoms at a later date.

Re: A (possible) solution to Covid-19

#204

Post by agumonkey »

ziga wrote: post #35

> More than 50% of the people infected with SARS-CoV-19 are asymptomatic (i.e. they have no illness). Note: asymptomatic at the time of testing. They may still develop symptoms over time. https://www.icelandreview.com/sci-tech/is-icelands-coronavir... https://twitter.com/cmyeaton/status/1246196001775460358

I don't know if all [corona]viruses move this way but it seems covid illness evolution goes in waves. high symptoms, 2 days ok, high symptoms, 2 days ok, ... repeat a few cycles

It's pretty confusing when symptoms are below a critical threshold and you don't have a test yet.

Re: A (possible) solution to Covid-19

#205

Post by ubercow13 »

throwaway_pdp09 wrote: post #177
ubercow13 wrote: post #169

How would you allow the harmless strain to spread without also spreading the deadly strain? If you relax or reverse social distancing, wouldn't the deadly strain also have a chance to spread widely again? It seems like you'd need to manually administer this strain to millions of people, or have very carefully administered 'contagion parties' where everyone is pre-screened for the deadly strain, while everyone else ke…

> you'd need to manually administer this strain to millions of people Yes. And how would that compare to the various trillions in stimulus to keep a choking world economy afloat, never mind the deaths that could be avoided? I don't understand posts like this, they say "if we had a good solution, how could we possibly use it?"

I think you’re reading too much into my post, I was just wondering how to safely carry out this idea.

One reason I was wondering is that manually administering the virus to people seems more akin to a vaccine in nature.

Re: A (possible) solution to Covid-19

#206

Post by danieltillett »

_-___________-_ wrote: post #195
danieltillett wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nobody knows the true asymptomatic rate, but even if it is 5o% the number of people that will be killed is massive. Let’s not get caught up on the final death rate and let’s look at what we can do right now.

The OP literally opens with a misinterpreted statistic. It links to an article about CFR and claims that the values are IFR instead of CFR. This is not "getting caught up on something", I'm pointing out a fundamental error. Most serious estimates of IFR are between 0.1 and 0.6%. The OP should be edited to either correctly state that COVID-19 kills between 1 and 3.5% of identified cases , or be updated to use numbers…

These IFR numbers you quote are also incorrect as there are many people infected who have not yet had time to die. The best estimate probably comes from South Korea (they seem to be picking up nearly all cases with their massive contact tracking and testing) where the death rate is at 1.8% and trending higher.

Re: A (possible) solution to Covid-19

#207

Post by rmu09 »

danieltillett wrote: post #203
rmu09 wrote: post #193

The results of a study in austria with 1500 randomly selected citizens have just been published, just 5 have been found to be currently infected with SARS-CoV2. The conclusion is that the prevalence of asymptomatic cases is about 0,32%, CL95 is 0,12-0,76%. Link (in german): https://www.sora.at/nc/news-presse/news/news-einzelansicht/n...

We are really more interested in mild cases, not asymptomatic cases. The evidence seems to be that most asymptomatic infections go on to show some symptoms at a later date.

They didn't really say asymptomatic or mild case, but presumably people with (strong) symptoms would have gotten a test and already be in the official statistics.

The next study that is currently being prepared will include antibody-tests, but it seems logistics and which test to use is not a trivial matter.

Re: A (possible) solution to Covid-19

#208

Post by NyxWulf »

danieltillett wrote: post #125
zxcmx wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You really want to find every single person who has been infected with the mutant strain and find out how sick they got. If you find a mutant that infected 10,000 people and didn’t cause any serious illness then you have a pretty good idea it safe.

I think the point is that you have to sequence people in the hospital as well, otherwise you won't know if that particular strain is safe or not.

If it is a rare strain, how will you know if it's safe? Seems like it would have to be a rare strain with thousands of cases and hospitalizations in that population are extremely rare.

Sampling bias and other confounding factors would be a real problem in this search, at least from a statistical point of view, imo.

I also think finding everyone who has been infected with a strain isn't feasible, at best you are sampling from the population.

Re: A (possible) solution to Covid-19

#209

Post by new299 »

danieltillett wrote: post #163
new299 wrote: post #160

You make this statement: "The most important thing to note is that such a virus would not be a vaccine from a regulatory perspective." Can you provide any evidence to back up this statement? If you were to start intentionally infecting people with a (naturally) attenuated strain claiming that it will confer immunity I suspect authorities would request you get regulatory approval. If you're approach does require regul…

You are looking at this from the wrong perspective. If people start spreading this attenuated strain around on their own what are the regulatory agencies going to do? Even if you wanted to go down the regulatory pathway for some reason it still has a number of advantages over other approaches. 1. We would know it is safe in humans before we began. 2. We would know what mutations make the virus less pathogenic. 3. Onc…

> What are regulatory agencies going to to do?

If you were to start doing this without regulatory approval, the most likely outcomes seems that you’d be arrested [1]. Do you have anything that suggests otherwise?

> 1. We would know it is safe in humans before we began.

The regulatory requirements for “knowing it is safe in humans” are currently quite high. As things stand, I would expect trials to be required. Can you provide any evidence to suggest trials wouldn’t be required?

You want to know how the vaccine effects individuals with pre-existing conditions etc. etc. And, as there’s always some risk, you want to be sure that the vaccine is effective.

> 2. We would know what mutations make the virus less pathogenic.

Large scale sequencing of the virus, in individuals and populations will be interesting. Being able to link this patient outcomes is also interesting. And might help in vaccine development. It would be interesting to have a large dataset of viral sequences from asymptomatic individuals. Can we see clear differences between asymptomatic and symptomatic individuals? This would be an interesting dataset, but I’m not sure that the results would be as clear as “look this deletion exists in a sub-population of asymptomatic individuals”. Would be a cool dataset and an interesting project though. There seems to be a lot of NGS data [2] available. This might be a suitable starting point for such a project.

> 4. It will be work in poor countries that can’t afford or distribute a conventional vaccine.

If a vaccine is available, then I suspect there will be sufficient international support to make it widely available. Having an active outbreak anywhere in the world would likely be deemed an unacceptable risk, given the potential for further mutation.

[1] https://www.theverge.com/2020/3/26/21195236/fbi-doj-arrest-f...

[2] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/genbank/sars-cov-2-seqs/

Re: A (possible) solution to Covid-19

#210

Post by ubercow13 »

danieltillett wrote: post #187
ubercow13 wrote: post #169

How would you allow the harmless strain to spread without also spreading the deadly strain? If you relax or reverse social distancing, wouldn't the deadly strain also have a chance to spread widely again? It seems like you'd need to manually administer this strain to millions of people, or have very carefully administered 'contagion parties' where everyone is pre-screened for the deadly strain, while everyone else ke…

There are dozens of ways the attenuated strain could be spread. You could do anything from going door to door sticking an infected swab up people’s noses to one of your contagion parties (they would be fun). Actually once a safe strain was identified it would be impossible to stop people spreading it on their own. People would test to make sure they had the safe strain and then invite everyone they knew around for te…

Everyone they knew would need screening for the asymptomatic deadly strain first, or there would be a risk of everyone at the party catching the wrong strain.
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