Producing a milder (and equally or more infectious) version of the virus that displaces the severe strain is one of nature’s ways of ending the pandemic. The severely ill people stay home / get shunned / die quickly and the mildly ill people circulate, so the milder version outcompetes the deadly version in the long run. This works as long as the versions are close enough that the mild version conveys sufficient immunity to the aggressive version – even mildly priming the immune system in general may help.
kwlf wrote:
The old style attenuated polio vaccine worked like this, at least to an extent
Only to a very limited extend within the patient’s body; the ‘live attenuated’ vaccines have one thing in common – the virus in it is so weak that it does not infect other people unless they are severely immunocompromised, if at all. Even the cow pox which gave ‘vaccination’ the name spreads from animals to humans, but human-to-human transmission does not happen in practice.
The biggest issue for a self-replicating vaccine (AKA mild version of the virus) is simply risk and testing. Just imagine getting that one wrong…
The challenges of vaccinating 90%+ of the population are not that great. In a normal year we manage to vaccinate over 10% of the population against influenza, and 50% of the at risk groups / 80% of the 65 year+ population with no issues whatsoever.
Increasing that capacity by a factor of 10 will be a bit of a challenge, but is not so far away from current capability as to be insurmountable and/or prohibitively expensive.
Only to a very limited extend within the patient’s body; the ‘live attenuated’ vaccines have one thing in common – the virus in it is so weak that it does not infect other people unless they are severely immunocompromised, if at all.
For several weeks after vaccination the vaccine virus replicates in the intestine, is excreted and can be spread to others in close contact. This means that in areas with poor hygiene and sanitation, immunization with OPV can result in ‘passive’ immunization of people who have not been vaccinated.
The risk was that sometimes the attenuated virus in the vaccine reverted to wild-type and caused outbreaks of disease.
Cobalt wrote:
The biggest issue for a self-replicating vaccine (AKA mild version of the virus) is simply risk and testing. Just imagine getting that one wrong…
The biggest issue is that people vaccinated with such a vaccine know that they are contagious and therefore intentionally infect others with a disease that very rarely but sometimes has severe consequences.
That is exactly why we no longer use Cow-Pox or the old style Polio vaccine in developed countries. The idea of an immunizations that spreads itself is tempting – but the liability questions both for manufacturers as well as for the vaccinated patients are just to big.
In addition as you said the risk is extremely high – mankind has never been really good in managing such interventions in ecosystems: Just think about cane toads in Australia…
UK hospital bed usage is up from 25% to 50% in just 1 week, so restrictions are moving fast here. Another week or two at this rate and we are out of capacity. Probably a combination of a more infectious strain and a lot of people ignoring it. It is also now clear that school kids are a major spreading factor – even though teachers are not generally catching it.
There are still people all over social media denying this is real.
There are lots of sources for deaths and infections, what are good sources about people hospitalised with Covid?
kwlf wrote:
The big question about virulence remains to be determined.
One of the leading German virologist shares the doubt: (sorry, German)
Some of the key statements:
“It’s pretty likely that this strain is already in Germany” (therefore travel restrictions imposed now are quite ineffective)
Those 70% is a politcal number “all of the sudden such numbers are in the media and we don’t even know, what is really meant” (by those 70%)
“With all the knowledge we currently have on this virus, it would be extremely surprising if a mutation could influence such an important parameter by such a significant amount”.
He has real doubts, if it’s really a new property of this strain that leads to the infection numbers in the UK, or “if it’s not just the case that in those areas where this strain happened to be the lockdown has not been strict enough…” so that we now see “…normal mechanisms of infection at work”.
I heard this morning that being vaccined doesn’t prevent you from infecting others. That’s bad.
Maybe next summer will be quasi normal like this one, but regulations could remain for years 
Flights to and from UK are banned in large parts of Europe now. Dover and Eurotunnel closed. UK appears to get totally isolated for now.
It may be too late however, cases have surfaced in Italy, Denmark, Netherlands and elsewhere.
There is good reason to hope and believe that the new strain is at least as prevalent in mainland Europe as it is in the part of the UK which is closest to the English channel. With 45% of worldwide CV19 sequencing being done in the UK, it is no great surprise that we “found” it.
We may hope that it is indeed too late for lockdown-junkie politicians and their useful idiot acolytes to stop the spread of this new and (anecdotally) more infectious and largely asymptomatic strain. That is, after all, how we all hope and expect this coronavirus pandemic to end – the pathogen evolves to be more easily transmitted and less likely to cause the host to stay in bed or die, while still provoking an immune response which is somewhat effective against the original strain(s).
Of course, M. Micron knows this (he is impeccably educated and anything but stupid), but he can hardly be criticised for grabbing such a golden opportunity to block Calais in a forlorn attempt turn up the heat in negotiations on the Future Relationship…
Hey ho… when our supplies of Chaource and Cuvée Vieille Vigne from Bergères-les-Vertus run out we’ll just have to make do with our own single malt, neaps, venison and spring water, as peasants at Glenswinton have done for centuries. 
Jujupilote wrote:
heard this morning that being vaccined doesn’t prevent you from infecting others. That’s bad.
Maybe next summer will be quasi normal like this one, but regulations could remain for years
Do you have a source for this? It would be a key information and indeed a major setback in the combat against the virus.
Jacko wrote:
Of course, M. Micron knows this (he is impeccably educated and anything but stupid), but he can hardly be criticised for grabbing such a golden opportunity to block Calais in a forlorn attempt turn up the heat in negotiations on the Future Relationship…
There’s no reason to suspect this has anything to do with the EU-UK trade talks, which have already missed the deadline set by the EU parliament, so there will be no deal on January 1st either way.
Politically, not acting with travel restrictions at this moment would have been foolish, although I too believe the virus strain should long since have crossed the channel if it is really more infectious.
