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Comment by username91 | Hacker News Reader

> virtually every other person is radioactive to you.

While you're not wrong, this behaviour is already present - just randomly distributed. Some/many people withdraw, interact with fear, maybe eventually get fed up and take risks, based on guessing-games.

If this research proves fruitful, it will reduce the guesswork a lot, and people can try to find more practical and constructive approaches.

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> this behaviour is already present - just randomly distributed

And this is exactly the reason why governments didn’t select for any factor in the first lockdowns and why the discussion about whether it is fair to exclude group X has merit - because while the effectiveness of such measures is high, the efficiency is not.

This would change the situation drastically. A government just tests the whole population on that marker and knows with a very high degree of confidence who is vulnerable.

This doesn't appear to be a permanent (DNA) biomarker, so pre-infection screening may not be effective. Depending on how quickly this marker can fluctuate, a full-population test might not even indicate who will be vulnerable three months from testing.

If only certain identifiable individuals are at risk of severe covid, I expect there would be no lockdowns, and that those individuals would be given the warning to lock themselves down as they see fit, for their own protection.

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