The “two strain” theory was debunked the very next day as bad science.
http://virological.org/t/response-to-on-the-origin-and-conti...
I can’t believe that a month later, this bad science is still being circulated, by a purported PhD and former professor.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Users need to follow the rules regardless of how right they are or feel they are. And of course there's the side benefit that if you turn out to be wrong, you at least won't have been a jerk about it.
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 proposal requires identifying new strains among symptomatic and asymptotic people, find strains that only occur with asymptomatic people, start infecting people with that strain, verify they are at lower risk. Then scale this up to ever larger populations.
If we knew of a less dangerous strain then sure you can start down that path. However, at this point there is significant evidence such a strain does not exist due to the extremely slow mutation rate, making this mostly wishful thinking.
The article seems to work within the current findings of many mutations and different mutations have varying degrees of impact on people.
Is not the same paper he's pointing to as having found a milder strain: https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.03.10.20033944v...
What am I missing? Are they both based on a flawed understanding?
"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.
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.
I was planning to go through all of his replies to other posters and debunk them one-by-one.
If you disagree strongly with someone, there are much better tools you can use like the down-vote button. Down-voted posts are harder to read and especially bad contributions get collapsed out of view.
Going out of your way to hound someone would only lower the S/N ratio here, which is not why we are all here; intellectual curiosity is why we keep coming back here not witch hunts.