Stupid ( probably) question about covid

[Lilly11a]

If one in three people are asymptomatic and a fair few others have mild symptoms, why are we not studying them and trying to replicate this in all members of the population.

As zero covid is impossible and it's likely to become endemic ,wouldn't it be a far easier solution if everyone who caught it had a mild disease rather then protect fully with vaccine only to have it mutate around it.

I m probably missing something very obvious here

I’m not sure what you mean? Are you expecting doctors to work out why some people only have mild symptoms and then some how change people’s DNA, immune system, life style or whatever it is which is causing them to only have mild symptoms?

1 in 3 people are not asymptomatic. 1 in 3 people who have covid are asymptomatic, there's a difference. And @Pissinthepottyplease puts it perfectly!

We don't really know why some people get severely ill and others mildly ill, or not ill at all. Most of the factors that determine how ill someone gets are beyond our direct control. So, while there are things we can do an individual level that may reduce our chances of getting very ill (stopping smoking, losing weight etc), we can't change people as a whole so that nobody gets seriously ill.

We also can't change the disease itself to be milder. Mutations and variants pop up randomly, out of our control.

What we can do, is provide people with a shot of immunity (i.e vaccines), which, because it helps the immune system fight the disease, results in much milder disease, or no disease at all.

Every time a virus replicates, there's a very, very small chance it will develop a new mutation, which may make it more resistant to vaccines. If less people are getting ill due to being vaccinated, or if they do get ill, the virus has less opportunity to replicate in their bodies because their immune system is stronger against it, the chances of a new variant popping up are lower. The chance isn't zero, so we will still get new variants. That's why we'll probably need booster vaccines, like with the flu jab. It's just a case of keeping apace of the virus.

I hope that makes sense.

Sorry I did mean 1 of 3 people with covid, not of the whole population.

@user1745 my( flawed) thinking was the people that got mildly ill couldn't have had antibodies at the time , at least at the beginning of the pandemic, so if we looked for what they had in common.
And if it was something simple like a higher then average iron level you could then prescribe for those towards the lower range of normal .
But I suppose that would have side effects which may be worse then the chance of catching covid

Some of the mild cases are likely due to getting a low initial dose of the virus. Remember that we had a lot of young doctors and nurses getting very sick with it early on when they didn't have adequate PPE. The ways to limit the initial dose of the virus are the same as the ways we use to try to prevent infection at all - ventilation, masks, social distancing and avoiding being inside with people.

This is sensible thinking and I'd expect that a research group out there is studying the characteristics of infected people by how severe their symptoms are or were. We do this for other diseases. However, it's likely that the reason that people react differently isn't something that can be easily solved, unfortunately. For example, we know that deprivation and being of certain ethnic groups makes you more likely to experience severe covid infection. It would be fab if it was something as simple as iron levels though!

We already do know some of the factors that mean people will have more severe disease. Things like age, obesity and pre-existing conditions will statistically mean a person more likely to be severely affected. Then there are cases where we don't know.
But all of this was obvious early on and has been endlessly talked about. So the real question is - where have you been for the last eighteen months? And how do you think we can de-age and de-weight and de-sick everyone overnight?

people who have had mild Covid are being studied to see if help can be found from the knowledge....covid.genomicc.org/