With little cost we could sequence a few thousand viral strains, or even tens of thousands of strains, from positive test sample from asymptomatic and/or mild case until we find a virus strain with the right mutations to make it harmless and which could work like a vaccine.
The manufacturing issues are not really my strength or extremely relevant to the idea, but this involves a live virus so you just need to grow it up in large scale cell cultures. We have the infrastructure for this in place in the biotech industry. One of the positives of SARS-CoV-2 from the perspective of my idea is how contagious it is - you only need a small number of viral particles to achieve an infection. This makes the scaling much easier.
The bigger issue at this point is finding the attenuated strain strain.
You address how many viral strains could be obtained, you don't address how many people have to be tested to obtain that many strains. Since you would need to find asymptomatic people, and current testing prioritizes only those with relevant symptoms, you would need to test many, many people to obtain enough asymptomatic occurrences. You do not provide an estimate for that number. Or if my assumption is wrong, then please take it as a sign that people without your specific expertise may come away with the same assumptions.
I don't necessarily expect you to answer all my questions: I offer them, and hope you take them in the spirit in which they are intended, which is as a sort of peer-review process (Though I am certainly not your peer in these matters: I mention that as an analogy) because I believe you do have a compelling idea, but I believe for it to gain much traction there are details that must be filled in, and others that must be spelled out more plainly for outsiders to your field that don't have your knowledge.
I certainly appreciate you engaging with me and indulging my curiosity, and questions that perhaps seem to have obvious answers to someone with more expertise in the field than I have.
In some countries they are doing a better job of testing the mild/asymptomatic cases (Germany, Singapore, South Korea are all examples). Even the USA these days is detecting plenty of positive mild cases.
We can use the the swab samples sitting in the testing facilities to do the genome sequencing.
Your response is quite common so I am writing a follow on post mon how this idea can be done in practice.
And to the extent we can rely on info from the US administration, Dr. Fauci commented (with some hedging) that Fall may bring widespread testing of the population at large for antibodies, which could be co-opted for this purpose as well.
I hope your proposal, and others proposing similar steps, win through. We need massively parallel efforts pursued. Not just to solve this current crisis, but to improve our overall global ability to rapidly reply to the next such problem. Best of luck to you.
With little cost we could sequence a few thousand viral strains, or even tens of thousands of strains, from positive test sample from asymptomatic and/or mild case until we find a virus strain with the right mutations to make it harmless and which could work like a vaccine.
The manufacturing issues are not really my strength or extremely relevant to the idea, but this involves a live virus so you just need to grow it up in large scale cell cultures. We have the infrastructure for this in place in the biotech industry. One of the positives of SARS-CoV-2 from the perspective of my idea is how contagious it is - you only need a small number of viral particles to achieve an infection. This makes the scaling much easier.
The bigger issue at this point is finding the attenuated strain strain.