How would you allow the harmless strain to spread without also spreading the deadly strain? If you relax or reverse social distancing, wouldn't the deadly strain also have a chance to spread widely again? It seems like you'd need to manually administer this strain to millions of people, or have very carefully administered 'contagion parties' where everyone is pre-screened for the deadly strain, while everyone else keeps social distancing.
> you'd need to manually administer this strain to millions of people
Yes. And how would that compare to the various trillions in stimulus to keep a choking world economy afloat, never mind the deaths that could be avoided?
I don't understand posts like this, they say "if we had a good solution, how could we possibly use it?"
Yes they would, but if people know their friends have the mild version they might choose to break the social distancing rules and go and visit them for a tea and nice close chat.
There are dozens of ways the attenuated strain could be spread. You could do anything from going door to door sticking an infected swab up people’s noses to one of your contagion parties (they would be fun).
Actually once a safe strain was identified it would be impossible to stop people spreading it on their own. People would test to make sure they had the safe strain and then invite everyone they knew around for tea and scones.
Everyone they knew would need screening for the asymptomatic deadly strain first, or there would be a risk of everyone at the party catching the wrong strain.
> It seems like you'd need to manually administer this strain to millions of people.
Yes, but this doesn't seem too hard. Just have some infected people spit in a cup, and mix it into large vats of raspberry jam and people can then just spread it on their toast on one morning.
