9 ms·

It appears this provides a way to truly distinguish who should be protected from SARS-Cov-2 infection and who shouldn’t, given a cheap test can be manufactured.

It appears this provides a way to truly distinguish who should be protected from SARS-Cov-2 infection and who shouldn’t, given a cheap test can be manufactured. The problem then is, that we and the individuals affected know which group they are belonging to. This makes a very alienable experience. Imagine being one of these people, virtually every other person is radioactive to you. What would be the societal and political implications of this? Lockdowns only for people who have this marker? I can imagine people wouldn’t want to make this test as it makes them turn paranoid, could we force people to make this test?

helge9210 5y ago
> This makes a very alienable experience. Imagine being one of these people, virtually every other person is radioactive to you. Looks like a psychiatric condition that needs a separate treatment.
- hdjjhhvvhga 5y ago
  On the contrary - looks like a reasonable reaction to me. You know the risk for you is very high, so you protect yourself better against the infection. The best tool we have is avoiding the infection by increasing physical distance from the aerosols in the air exhaled by others.
  - skocznymroczny 5y ago
    If you're vaccinated and believe in vaccines, it's safer than ever in this pandemic to go out, especially if you avoid indoor areas. I am concerned about some people who haven't really left their homes since March 2020. I know some of such people, and they are really paranoid. They are vaccinated, but even if they are outdoors, they say that "everyone around is spitting on them". It's very unhealthy and the more they stay in isolation, the harder it is for them to convince themselves it's relatively safe to go outside.
    - jonathanstrange 5y ago
      On the other hand, there are people taking lots of unnecessary risks for no ones benefit. As a typical example, in the 12+ years I've been working at our research institute, nobody has ever organized an institute-wide joint lunch and nobody ever expressed any interest in it. On the contrary, many colleagues hate these kinds of events. But now that everyone is vaccinated (or at least assumed to be, nobody checks it), they have organized a 4 hour indoor meeting plus a joint lunch that you can hardly avoid. Nevermind perhaps waiting another year for organizing this. It has to be now to bolster team spirit, etc. The people who do this think they're geniuses, and literally say things like "we should push people to go to international conference again instead of giving Zoom talks", and so on. In reality, everybody just projects their own preferences and fears onto others. The people pushing for hitherto unknown social events are extraverts, the people who prefer to stay home and give Zoom talks are introverts. The bottomline is that there is nothing wrong with being an introvert and avoiding large crowds is quite reasonable even when you're fully vaccinated. (Less so if you recently got a booster shot, but e.g. in our country it will take a while until every adult has received one.) Infection numbers in our country are going up rapidly, with an R-value close to 2. Then, close to Christmas when measures have to be announced, everybody will act surprised again, of course.
- BjoernKW 5y ago
  That condition seems to be fairly widespread right now already. It's even encouraged under the moniker of "social distancing" (which itself is a telling misnomer; "physical distancing" would've been a much more appropriate and less jarring term but somehow that never stuck), even though there have been better alternatives (getting vaccinated, getting tested when meeting with a larger group of people, wearing high-quality masks) for quite some time now.
_Microft 5y ago
I expected that a test for the risk of suffering a severe case would be done after a positive Covid test, not before. That is to decide the further treatment and not to make people take more (or less!) measures of precaution.
- protoman3000 5y ago
  The demand of negatives to live their live without what is perceived as unacceptable measures (remember when asking people to wear masks was too much asked?) will force politics to draw this tool out of the toolbox.
username91 5y ago
> 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.
- protoman3000 5y ago
  > 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.
  - tremon 5y ago
    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.
  - q1w2 5y ago
    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.
mschuster91 5y ago
> Imagine being one of these people, virtually every other person is radioactive to you. There's an easy fix for these people: get vaccinated. Easy and free.
- glenneroo 5y ago
  Getting vaccinated doesn't guarantee you will not have any complications. It increases the chances that a person will have zero or only mild symptoms, depending on which strain encountered, yet hospitalization and/or death are not completely out of the question i.e. to think you are invincible because you have received one of the various available vaccinations (each of which has varying degrees of effectiveness against various strains), is probably not a good strategy.
  - resonious 5y ago
    There is also a non-zero chance of getting hit by a bus if you leave your house. Might as well not go outside. Forgive the joke, but this feels like a glass-half-empty take on something we're not fully understanding. I think we should look at numbers before determining whether or not the vaccine is a good strategy. Life involves risks.
    - glenneroo 5y ago
      Perhaps I should have linked to this as my source: https://informationisbeautiful.net/visualizations/covid-19-coronavirus-infographic-datapack/ https://informationisbeautiful.net/visualizations/covid-19-c... Granted the data about vaccines efficacy was last updated end of July 2021, yet according to those numbers, I'm fairly sure the chances of getting hit by a bus are considerably lower. Also you can more easily avoid getting hit by a bus by looking both ways before your cross the street (freak bus accidents aside), whereas avoiding an invisible virus is slightly more difficult.
      - resonious 5y ago
        Thanks for the link. Getting hit by a bus is a bad example for sure. I just wanted to paint a picture about there being risks in life. According to "usafacts.org" [1] there's a (very) roughly 1.6% rate of death, not controlling for age. The informationisbeautiful data shows that I'm >90% protected from extreme cases with 2 doses. That feels pretty safe to me given how low the rate of an extreme case is to begin with. (I'll admit I only measured death though) You're right, though, it's not invincibility. That's a pretty high bar for anything. [1] https://usafacts.org/visualizations/coronavirus-covid-19-spread-map/ https://usafacts.org/visualizations/coronavirus-covid-19-spr...
spywaregorilla 5y ago
No, no, no. This is not a pre existing marker. You can't test people for this before they're infected
- jaywalk 5y ago
  "One could even use the marker to make a prediction about the course of a Covid-19 disease before the person is even infected," Yekelchyk says. Do you have some information that the researchers who performed this study don't?
  - obiwan14 5y ago
    Either that or he didn't read the article.
  - spywaregorilla 5y ago
    This is like observing structural damage to a bridge after an explosion. If there's a lot of structural damage, the bridge is likely to collapse later on. If there happens to be structural damage before the explosion, sure, you can probably make similar inferences about danger after the explosion. But the absence of structural damage before the explosion is not great evidence that it'll look like that afterwards. This is a biomarker of damaged lungs. Covid can be the thing that causes the damage on a clean slate. edit: so to clarify, you can't test this to confidently state that someone will be fine with covid prior to infection. you might be able to identify some people that will definitely struggle but its likely that this information wouldn't be too surprising to them.
    - jaywalk 5y ago
      But you're saying they can't use this marker to make a pre-infection prediction, and they're saying it's possible.
      - spywaregorilla 5y ago
        I'm saying the absence of it is unlikely to be a reliable indicator of poor outcomes. The presence of it may be useful. My point is that this is not some general trait that some people have some people don't. This is a cell marker that tells the larger system that the cell should be killed. The cells only start to express this when they're doing poorly. Many people start to do poorly only after they get the disease. I would also reckon that known comorbidities are likely to be a more reliable, significantly easier to measure predictive feature for estimating risk before they get covid.
roody15 5y ago
“ Lockdowns only for people who have this marker? I can imagine people wouldn’t want to make this test as it makes them turn paranoid, could we force people to make this test?” I disagree here. People would want to know if they are at risk. For example in our local school system there has been 40 teachers who have tested positive and 230 students since school started this fall (2600 students in the district). Out of the confirmed positive cases we have had 0 severe cases. 0 hospitalizations with an average illness of around 3-5 days. The amount of school activities missed due to contact tracing, exposure protocols has been immense. The constant stress of a scary pandemic weighs heavily on the community. Imagine if all students, staff and community members could be screened to see if they were vulnerable. Precautions could be made for this select group. The overall health of the community and school system would improve drastically utilizing another tool to put the scope and danger of this pandemic in perspective.
- IanSanders 5y ago
  > The amount of school activities missed Has been more or less spread across population. If only a known subset is affected, those will become disadvantaged and possibly even discriminated during employment.
  - joshuahughes 5y ago
    So... your solution is to force every child to suffer equally in the same disadvantaged position??
rlpb 5y ago
> What would be the societal and political implications of this? Lockdowns only for people who have this marker? I don't think this would be necessary. Vulnerable people can decide for themselves what precautions they wish to take. Lockdowns are to force _others_ to take precautions to protect the vulnerable.
nervousvarun 5y ago
I think we all now know the answer to a different but related question: What are the societal/political implications of locking everyone down? It's a relatively rare condition some people have which is unfortunate for that population of people but this isn't unprecedented. Do you put John Travolta in the bubble? Or do you put everyone in the bubble?
cobbal 5y ago
It's not like this is a new thing. Those of us at high risk for COVID because of other conditions have been living in that reality for a while now. More so before the vaccine was available.
mariodiana 5y ago
My gut reaction to general lockdowns, early on in this pandemic, was that they were driven more by an inviolable ethic of egalitarianism than by a rational assessment of risk, especially since the most dangerous comorbities seemed to correlate with demographics that, historically or presently, suffer from prejudice.

helge9210 5y ago

> This makes a very alienable experience. Imagine being one of these people, virtually every other person is radioactive to you. Looks like a psychiatric condition that needs a separate treatment.

hdjjhhvvhga 5y ago
On the contrary - looks like a reasonable reaction to me. You know the risk for you is very high, so you protect yourself better against the infection. The best tool we have is avoiding the infection by increasing physical distance from the aerosols in the air exhaled by others.
- skocznymroczny 5y ago
  If you're vaccinated and believe in vaccines, it's safer than ever in this pandemic to go out, especially if you avoid indoor areas. I am concerned about some people who haven't really left their homes since March 2020. I know some of such people, and they are really paranoid. They are vaccinated, but even if they are outdoors, they say that "everyone around is spitting on them". It's very unhealthy and the more they stay in isolation, the harder it is for them to convince themselves it's relatively safe to go outside.
  - jonathanstrange 5y ago
    On the other hand, there are people taking lots of unnecessary risks for no ones benefit. As a typical example, in the 12+ years I've been working at our research institute, nobody has ever organized an institute-wide joint lunch and nobody ever expressed any interest in it. On the contrary, many colleagues hate these kinds of events. But now that everyone is vaccinated (or at least assumed to be, nobody checks it), they have organized a 4 hour indoor meeting plus a joint lunch that you can hardly avoid. Nevermind perhaps waiting another year for organizing this. It has to be now to bolster team spirit, etc. The people who do this think they're geniuses, and literally say things like "we should push people to go to international conference again instead of giving Zoom talks", and so on. In reality, everybody just projects their own preferences and fears onto others. The people pushing for hitherto unknown social events are extraverts, the people who prefer to stay home and give Zoom talks are introverts. The bottomline is that there is nothing wrong with being an introvert and avoiding large crowds is quite reasonable even when you're fully vaccinated. (Less so if you recently got a booster shot, but e.g. in our country it will take a while until every adult has received one.) Infection numbers in our country are going up rapidly, with an R-value close to 2. Then, close to Christmas when measures have to be announced, everybody will act surprised again, of course.
BjoernKW 5y ago
That condition seems to be fairly widespread right now already. It's even encouraged under the moniker of "social distancing" (which itself is a telling misnomer; "physical distancing" would've been a much more appropriate and less jarring term but somehow that never stuck), even though there have been better alternatives (getting vaccinated, getting tested when meeting with a larger group of people, wearing high-quality masks) for quite some time now.

_Microft 5y ago

I expected that a test for the risk of suffering a severe case would be done after a positive Covid test, not before. That is to decide the further treatment and not to make people take more (or less!) measures of precaution.

protoman3000 5y ago
The demand of negatives to live their live without what is perceived as unacceptable measures (remember when asking people to wear masks was too much asked?) will force politics to draw this tool out of the toolbox.

username91 5y ago

> 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.

protoman3000 5y ago
> 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.
- tremon 5y ago
  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.
- q1w2 5y ago
  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.

mschuster91 5y ago

> Imagine being one of these people, virtually every other person is radioactive to you. There's an easy fix for these people: get vaccinated. Easy and free.

glenneroo 5y ago
Getting vaccinated doesn't guarantee you will not have any complications. It increases the chances that a person will have zero or only mild symptoms, depending on which strain encountered, yet hospitalization and/or death are not completely out of the question i.e. to think you are invincible because you have received one of the various available vaccinations (each of which has varying degrees of effectiveness against various strains), is probably not a good strategy.
- resonious 5y ago
  There is also a non-zero chance of getting hit by a bus if you leave your house. Might as well not go outside. Forgive the joke, but this feels like a glass-half-empty take on something we're not fully understanding. I think we should look at numbers before determining whether or not the vaccine is a good strategy. Life involves risks.
  - glenneroo 5y ago
    Perhaps I should have linked to this as my source: https://informationisbeautiful.net/visualizations/covid-19-coronavirus-infographic-datapack/ https://informationisbeautiful.net/visualizations/covid-19-c... Granted the data about vaccines efficacy was last updated end of July 2021, yet according to those numbers, I'm fairly sure the chances of getting hit by a bus are considerably lower. Also you can more easily avoid getting hit by a bus by looking both ways before your cross the street (freak bus accidents aside), whereas avoiding an invisible virus is slightly more difficult.
    - resonious 5y ago
      Thanks for the link. Getting hit by a bus is a bad example for sure. I just wanted to paint a picture about there being risks in life. According to "usafacts.org" [1] there's a (very) roughly 1.6% rate of death, not controlling for age. The informationisbeautiful data shows that I'm >90% protected from extreme cases with 2 doses. That feels pretty safe to me given how low the rate of an extreme case is to begin with. (I'll admit I only measured death though) You're right, though, it's not invincibility. That's a pretty high bar for anything. [1] https://usafacts.org/visualizations/coronavirus-covid-19-spread-map/ https://usafacts.org/visualizations/coronavirus-covid-19-spr...

spywaregorilla 5y ago

No, no, no. This is not a pre existing marker. You can't test people for this before they're infected

jaywalk 5y ago
"One could even use the marker to make a prediction about the course of a Covid-19 disease before the person is even infected," Yekelchyk says. Do you have some information that the researchers who performed this study don't?
- obiwan14 5y ago
  Either that or he didn't read the article.
- spywaregorilla 5y ago
  This is like observing structural damage to a bridge after an explosion. If there's a lot of structural damage, the bridge is likely to collapse later on. If there happens to be structural damage before the explosion, sure, you can probably make similar inferences about danger after the explosion. But the absence of structural damage before the explosion is not great evidence that it'll look like that afterwards. This is a biomarker of damaged lungs. Covid can be the thing that causes the damage on a clean slate. edit: so to clarify, you can't test this to confidently state that someone will be fine with covid prior to infection. you might be able to identify some people that will definitely struggle but its likely that this information wouldn't be too surprising to them.
  - jaywalk 5y ago
    But you're saying they can't use this marker to make a pre-infection prediction, and they're saying it's possible.
    - spywaregorilla 5y ago
      I'm saying the absence of it is unlikely to be a reliable indicator of poor outcomes. The presence of it may be useful. My point is that this is not some general trait that some people have some people don't. This is a cell marker that tells the larger system that the cell should be killed. The cells only start to express this when they're doing poorly. Many people start to do poorly only after they get the disease. I would also reckon that known comorbidities are likely to be a more reliable, significantly easier to measure predictive feature for estimating risk before they get covid.

roody15 5y ago

“ Lockdowns only for people who have this marker? I can imagine people wouldn’t want to make this test as it makes them turn paranoid, could we force people to make this test?” I disagree here. People would want to know if they are at risk. For example in our local school system there has been 40 teachers who have tested positive and 230 students since school started this fall (2600 students in the district). Out of the confirmed positive cases we have had 0 severe cases. 0 hospitalizations with an average illness of around 3-5 days. The amount of school activities missed due to contact tracing, exposure protocols has been immense. The constant stress of a scary pandemic weighs heavily on the community. Imagine if all students, staff and community members could be screened to see if they were vulnerable. Precautions could be made for this select group. The overall health of the community and school system would improve drastically utilizing another tool to put the scope and danger of this pandemic in perspective.

IanSanders 5y ago
> The amount of school activities missed Has been more or less spread across population. If only a known subset is affected, those will become disadvantaged and possibly even discriminated during employment.
- joshuahughes 5y ago
  So... your solution is to force every child to suffer equally in the same disadvantaged position??

rlpb 5y ago

> What would be the societal and political implications of this? Lockdowns only for people who have this marker? I don't think this would be necessary. Vulnerable people can decide for themselves what precautions they wish to take. Lockdowns are to force _others_ to take precautions to protect the vulnerable.

nervousvarun 5y ago

I think we all now know the answer to a different but related question: What are the societal/political implications of locking everyone down? It's a relatively rare condition some people have which is unfortunate for that population of people but this isn't unprecedented. Do you put John Travolta in the bubble? Or do you put everyone in the bubble?

cobbal 5y ago

It's not like this is a new thing. Those of us at high risk for COVID because of other conditions have been living in that reality for a while now. More so before the vaccine was available.

mariodiana 5y ago

My gut reaction to general lockdowns, early on in this pandemic, was that they were driven more by an inviolable ethic of egalitarianism than by a rational assessment of risk, especially since the most dangerous comorbities seemed to correlate with demographics that, historically or presently, suffer from prejudice.