From the HN Guidelines[1]:

"On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity."

also:

"Please don't complain that a submission is inappropriate. If a story is spam or off-topic, flag it. Don't feed egregious comments by replying; flag them instead. If you flag, please don't also comment that you did."

[1] - https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

This particular study though doesn't have any impact on how we personally react to the virus though, so it falls into the realm of intellectually stimulating.

It’s a typical geek bait: a lot of smart words, some obscure info that needs to be superficially researched first to be understandable. At the age of the attention economy this specific specimen of information is highly engaging for this specific slice of population.

HN is disproportionately composed of multidisciplinary generalists with backgrounds in a range of fields, including virology and molecular biology.

There is no harm in having smart people reading breakthrough literature in other fields. Even if we don't understand every detail, often with enough experience in other fields you can still get the gist and there's always opportunity for cross-pollination.

>Trying to ascribe meaning to highly technical results seems futile (at best) or irresponsible (at worst).

I'd like to point out that this is primarily how grad school on the cutting edge works. You pick a subject and start reading papers until piece by piece things start to make sense. Frequently people do so by jumping into a graduate topic that can be quite different from their undergrad, and this is still a valid way to learn for a subset of the population.

Frankly given the gravity of the pandemic I don't think any published article is inappropriate for HN right now.