"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.
> The premise that there is an "asymptomatic strain" is still theoretically possible but unsubstantiated, despite ongoing investigation.
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.
"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.