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Comment by phkahler | Hacker News Reader

There are 2 strains?

So... you argue that 20% of the population had this disease, except that they didn't have this disease they had a close relative that is almost entirely asymptomatic in exactly the way you need it to be in order to explain away the case fatality rate measured for the disease we do know about?

I genuinely don't understand the desire on the part of so many people to... just not believe the relatively obvious (but still not remotely certain) fact that this is a very serious disease with an unmitigated doubling rate somewhere around 5 days and with somewhere in the realm of a 1% CFR. Really, the data matches that very well.

Certainly there is room for lots of uncertainty, but if your policy desires demand the invention of a second strain and whatnot... maybe it's time to revisit your priors?

https://www.google.com.hk/amp/s/amp.usatoday.com/amp/5080571...

That would be a very obvious thing to detect (and we have not seen evidence of that).

evidence of what? two separate strains?

this paper mentions two strains[0], 'L' and 'S' type, was it refuted?

[0]: https://academic.oup.com/nsr/article/doi/10.1093/nsr/nwaa036...

yes: https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/03/mutations-can-reveal...

Just read it and they were not disputing the existence of two strains but rather that the virus didnt jump from animals twice. The article disputes the claim that because L strain is 70% of the cases, that it must be more virulent.

the distinction is important here because this subthread started from the suggestion that there are multiple strains circulating, with different virulence. The fact there are multiple lineages is a natural consequence of how viruses spread

There's probably hundreds or even thousands of mutations of this coronavirus. It's kinda what it does. But they're basically meaningless, although it is useful for tracking how it spreads - kinda like a family tree.

See: https://nextstrain.org/ncov/global

There is pretty much no evidence of what common people would call "multiple strains" - as in, immunity doesn't transfer, different infection characteristics, etc.

The paper you posted was debunked pretty much instantly by people that know what they're talking about. There's a lot of junk papers out there written by people on coronavirus that aren't even in the field.

Evidence of one, less dangerous, strain, followed by a more dangerous strain that arrived months later. No such evidence exists.

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