Is there a outwardly visible way to identify these people so they can get the vaccine first?
Even if not very reliable surely it would help.
> that is inherited from Neanderthals and is carried by around 50% of people in south Asia and around 16% of people in Europe.
I'm not personally against identifying physical traits that would help serve as a quick-and-dirty visual test of risk assessment and I don't know what's going on with downvotes on HN beyond "there's a pandemic on and voting has been wonky all year, presumably because people are stressed out."
When I was getting divorced, I did not want to date men who were likely to be carriers because it's homozygous recessive, so if the father is a carrier there is a 50 percent chance the child will be a carrier and a 50 percent chance they will have CF. I am incapable of producing a "normal" child (and didn't know that when I was having kids).
My quick and dirty genetics test to drastically reduce the odds that I was dating a carrier boiled down to "No White Men Allowed." Other ethnicities are dramatically less likely to be carriers.
So it doesn't sound silly to me at all that you could take one look at someone and infer some stats about the odds of their genetic risks for a specific category.
I have a predominantly Caucasian genetic disorder. The quick-and-dirty visual test for "How high is your risk of being a carrier or having the condition?" is "Are you White?"
(I have a red beard and 23andme confirmed my Neanderthal genes)