COVID-19 Suceptibility Florida

To reveal genetic determinants of susceptibility to COVID-19 severity in the population and further explore potential immune-related factors, we performed a genome-wide association study on 284 confirmed COVID-19 patients (cases) and 95 healthy individuals (controls). We compared cases and controls of European (EUR) ancestry and African American (AFR) ancestry separately. To further exploring the linkage between HLA and COVID-19 severity, we applied fine-mapping analysis to dissect the HLA association with mild and severe cases. 284 confirmed COVID-19 samples were obtained from Boca Biolistics (Pompano Beach, FL) and CTSI Biorepository at the University of Florida (Gainesville, FL). The median age of the patients was 44.7 years (range: 3-94 years). Patients had positive test results for SARS-CoV-2 by RT-PCR from nasopharyngeal swabs or tracheal aspirates. 89 healthy individuals with negative PCR tests for SARS-CoV-2 viral infection were included as controls. The median age of the control group was 60 years (range: 0‐101 years). After the exclusion of samples during quality control, the final case-control data sets comprised 254 patients and 80 control participants.