The Major Genetic Risk Factor for Severe COVID-19 Does Not Show Any Association Among Indian Populations

Abstract

With the growing evidence on the variable human susceptibility against COVID-19, it is evident that some genetic loci modulate the severity of the infection. Recent studies have identified several loci associated with greater severity. More recently, a study has identified a 50kb segment introgressed from Neanderthal adding a risk for COVID-19, and this trait is present among 16% and 50% people of European and South Asian origin respectively. Contrary to this finding, our studies on ACE2 identified a haplotype present among 20% and 60% of European and South Asian populations respectively, which appears to be responsible for the low case fatality ratio among South Asian populations. This result was also consistent with the realtime infection rate and case fatality ratio among various states of India. We readdressed this issue using both of the contrasting datasets and compared them with the realtime infection rates and case fatality ratio in India. We found out that the polymorphism present in the 50kb introgressed segment (rs10490770) did not show any significant correlation with the realtime infection and case fatality ratio in India.