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A race to determine what drives COVID-19 severity

Efforts are ongoing to find which human or viral factors underpin whether a person with COVID-19 will develop severe symptoms. Clinical evidence linked to two viral lineages now provides key insights into this enigma.
By
  1. Marios Koutsakos

    1. Marios Koutsakos is in the Department of Microbiology and Immunology at the Peter Doherty Institute for Infection and Immunity, The University of Melbourne, Parkville, Victoria 3010, Australia.

  2. Katherine Kedzierska

    1. Katherine Kedzierska is in the Department of Microbiology and Immunology at the Peter Doherty Institute for Infection and Immunity, The University of Melbourne, Parkville, Victoria 3010, Australia.

The coronavirus known as severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS‑CoV-2) emerged in late 2019, and certain aspects of the disease it causes — COVID‑19 — continue to baffle clinicians and researchers. It is estimated that SARS-CoV-2 has already infected more than 9 million people and claimed more than 450,000 lives worldwide, and this pandemic has paralysed economies globally. Writing in Nature, Zhang et al.1 present data on the evolution of two major lineages of SARS-CoV-2, together with information regarding human-host determinants of disease severity from their analysis of 326 people in Shanghai, China, who were infected with SARS-CoV-2.

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Nature 583, 366-368 (2020)

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-020-01915-3

References

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