I totally missed it from the article but how is he going to tell the deadly strain from the less deadly one? I mean I understand how they can tell the difference between the two strains. But how to tell that some particular strain is less deadly? To the best of my understanding the only way to get there is to sequence the virus from statistically significant number (~10^5 ??) of carriers including the significant proportion of those with asymptomatic cases. Not realistic IMHO.
Not to mention relying on each person's account of the severity of the symptoms, and coding that into a dataset that corresponds to the sequencing results. You need a LOT of asymptomatic people with the strain in order to draw any strong conclusions.
The upside is, you may draw other very interesting conclusions while collecting data for this mission, and be able to "pivot" if you will.
This is all described in the post. I have updated it to make it a little clearer (based on feedback). If you missed it the first time around you might get it now.
