We are looking for an attenuated strain and that will be found in people with a mild case. We could sequence all cases, but we would exclude any strain that puts someone in hospital so it is a waste of resources to sequence viruses from people in hospital. From a practical perspective it is better to concentrate on people with only mild cases.
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?
I do describe this in my blog post.
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.
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.
politicians aren't stupid, they just play a different game and it looks really dumb from the outside. for them, their moves make sense, they're pros at it.
anyway, you've done very well to find yourself on the top 30 of HN. the smarter press reads this directly. the less smart press reads it a few days later after it spreads through the net via reddits, facebooks, etc. hopefully it's a matter of time a good headline will find its way to pair of eyes in the right place at the right time.
Yes hopefully this thread gets some attention from others.