[dragonsh]

Well this is what many countries and scientists are already doing. It’s just not working as virus is unpredictable and it might infect some but not others.

The best way to find a solution is still try to understand how it acts on different types of people and if they have underlying previous conditions what changes it does, this takes time and I believe that’s the reason there isn’t any cure except by chance in a short time.

[jfoster]

Are they already doing that? Is there somewhere I can find the statistics broken out by strain? Or even a list of identifiers of the known strains?

From what I've seen, it's been published in some news articles and such that there "might be" different strains. Haven't seen anything particularly solid yet.

[dragonsh]

Covid-19 is not mutating like other viruses, but it acts differently on different people, and very problematic for people with pre-existing conditions. Also in some cases again not proven it also infected heart muscles, now it’s not clear yet that it’s due to pneumonia or covid-19. In China they tried plasma from recovered patients and that also didn’t yield very good results. Also in some studies they find a correlation between BCG vaccine and low mortality (again not proven).

The issue with covid-19 is that it’s proving to be much harder to understand than other viruses in spite of not mutating like flu virus. Hopefully by more studies we can increase the chances of developing some cure or may be with so many efforts someone discover cure by chance.

[mkl]

Huh? The key premise of the article is that the SARS-CoV-2 virus is mutating.

[dragonsh]

Well it’s not mutating the virus they found in initial cases is still the same as the one at present in Patients in Europe and USA.

The premise of article is actually not novel, it’s the way vaccines are made. Smallpox way of developing vaccine in crude way without scientific understanding was done in the early years, now we have come very far.

This virus is really novel that’s the reason novel corona virus (covid-19). Scientists and research community are frantically searching for a vaccine or treatment plan to manage it. So far there is a very limited understanding. Hope can find some way to treat it, otherwise only solution left is relying on herd immunity.

[danieltillett]

The premise of using an attenuated virus as a vaccine is not novel, but the idea of using genome sequencing to find an attenuated strain and showing through epidemiology that it is safe does seem to be novel.

Even if it doesn’t pan out I think it is worth trying.