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Science Technology

Oxford Scientists Find Gene That Doubles Risk of Dying From Covid-19 (bloomberg.com) 100

Posted by msmash from the closer-look dept.
Scientists identified a specific gene that doubles the risk of respiratory failure from Covid-19 and may go some way to explaining why some ethnic groups are more susceptible to severe disease than others. From a report: Researchers from the University of Oxford found that a higher-risk version of the gene most likely prevents the cells lining airways and the lungs from responding to the virus properly. About 60% of people with South Asian ancestry carry this version of the gene, compared with 15% of people with European heritage, according to the study published Thursday. The findings help explain why higher rates of hospitalization and death may have been seen in certain communities and on the Indian subcontinent. The authors cautioned that the gene cannot be used as a sole explanation as many other factors, such as socioeconomic conditions, play a role. Despite a significant impact from the virus to people with Afro-Caribbean ancestry, only 2% carry the higher-risk genotype. People with the gene, known as LZTFL1, would particularly benefit from vaccination, which remains the best method of protection, the authors said. The findings raise the possibility of research into treatments specific to patients with this gene, though no tailored drugs are currently available.
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Oxford Scientists Find Gene That Doubles Risk of Dying From Covid-19 More

Oxford Scientists Find Gene That Doubles Risk of Dying From Covid-19

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  • This is kinda what scares me (Score:5, Interesting)

    by rsilvergun ( 571051 ) on Thursday November 04, 2021 @04:07PM (#61958211)
    how random it can be. Yeah, if you're obese or have breathing problems or just old your risk naturally goes way up. But this thing where it just randomly kills otherwise healthy people at fairly high rates.

    Youtuber Beau Of The Fifth column made a good point, folks say it's got a 99.9% survival rate, but with 330 million Americans if that's true we should have about 300k deaths. We just passed 750,000, and last I check it's still around 2000 a day.

    • 80,000 residents in my county.

      Totals as of today:
      7,064 positive cases (including me).
      294 hospitalizations
      86 deaths (all age 70+ and half from a single nursing home outbreak way back at the start).
      63% vaccinated.

      I'm genuinely not trying to troll. It just seems like the pandemic laid waste to people in some areas, but it didn't even happen in other places. Where I live people are wondering what everybody else is so afraid of.

      • Re: (Score:2, Troll)

        by kunwon1 ( 795332 )
        Are there any republicans in charge in your city, county, or state? If so, are you sure your numbers are accurate? Seems like a lot of maga idiots have been fudging the numbers (desantis springs immediately to mind)

      • 85 deaths our of less than 80,000 people, I did the math and that would be like having an extra 58 years of murders in my area. In just one year. And the US has a relatively high murder rate...

        If you're wondering what people are afraid of, it simply means that your life isn't worth very much compared to a typical life on planet Earth.

        • I think its important to look at things globally not regionally. Media is trying REALLY hard to make covid-19 sound more deadly than the spanish flu of 1918. How? By quoting the deaths just in the USA. But there was no air travel of significance in 1918. International travel was very limited, and intrastate travel nothing like it is now. Given that the virus originated in europe (not actually spain) it killed way more people there than here. 50 million worldwide. If we had the same travel limitations we had

          • Large numbers of soldiers without social distancing in close quarters. Then transporting them all around the world after World War I. Ships are much better incubators for spreading disease than aeroplanes, especially considering the cramped spaces and long confinements.

            Add on top of that poorer medical care and technology, greater difficulty in social distancing, no remote working and all the other social distancing measures weâ(TM)ve deployed. Youâ(TM)re not comparing apples to apples.

      • Let's do some math. 46.3 million Americans have gotten sick, 331 million Americans exists, ergo:
        (7064/80000)-(46.3/331)=-0.05158

        To hit the US average your county would need a full 5% to get Covid tomorrow. I guarantee you that if 5% of the county came down with Covid, and they got hospitalized at the same rate as before, the 150-200 extra hospitalizations would stretch you to the max and the death rate from everything would skyrocket.

      • Re:This is kinda what scares me (Score:4, Interesting)

        by zeeky boogy doog ( 8381659 ) on Thursday November 04, 2021 @07:01PM (#61958609)
        If you're in the US, those case numbers suggest that you have Democratic leadership at the both the state and county level who have largely done an effective job fighting it, and you're now on the "durr overreaction" branch of the reaction curve. My own county with population 392K has 28K cases and 310 deaths, and our relative counts match up very closely. We're currently at 66% of entire population vaccinated, and despite everything being open, cases are continuing to slowly decline. Hopefully now that we can start vaccinating kids 5-12, we can deliver a knockout punch to the last entirely unvaccinated vector it has just in time for the arrival of indoor weather and the holiday socializing season and send cases into a rapid decrease.

        On the other end of the spectrum you've got Florida where the strategy is apparently "knowing the killbots have a preprogrammed kill limit, I threw wave after wave of men against them until they reached the limit and shut down." Except unlike Brannigan, Death Santa is wrong and the nano killbots don't have a kill limit.
        • The Democratic Leadership has done a textbook horrible job handling the pandemic. The historical record, including WHO guidelines that Fauci was a part of making, was sacrificed to politics. Fauci himself was the worst: by setting up, maintaining despite orders not to, and not managing the China contract that transferred bioweapons technology to China. The Covid death toll data omits the deaths and case spreading attributable to illegal aliens, of whom there are over 35 million now in the US, with a good f

      • It depends on the strain as well. If your county was mostly infected by the Alpha strain, then they're in better shape than if they were mostly infected by the Delta strain. And those who caught the relatively milder Alpha strain would then be fairly immune against catching the Delta strain.

      • Where I live people are wondering what everybody else is so afraid of.

        Population density is a huge factor. There are more tourists visiting my town on a sunny summer weekend -up to 2x for special events (according to the stats from the local hotels/tourist board) than live in your entire county.

        It is much easier to control the spread of infections when the population in naturally maintaining a distance throughout most of their day than when people are packing in shoulder to shoulder.

    • Re:This is kinda what scares me (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Wraithlyn ( 133796 ) on Thursday November 04, 2021 @05:08PM (#61958371)

      The Economist put out an article the other day estimating the true global death toll as 17 million (instead of the official tally of 5 million), undercounting by a factor of 3.4x: https://www.economist.com/grap... [economist.com]

      If that is true, Covid has already killed roughly 0.2% of the global population. And it's obviously going to continue to kill a lot more people.

      • Under-estimates seem far more likely to me but the whole thing is a crap shoot. Between the best case and worst case we are certainly talking a order of magnitude, but none of these discussions really say what should be done. If the worst case is true, should our efforts be much different than the best case? Best case versus worst case, will the world really embrace the changes it needs to solve the crisis. I hate the blame China mentality because the reality is a whole world is complacent to acts that will

        • Between the best case and worst case we are certainly talking a order of magnitude, but none of these discussions really say what should be done.

          What the fuck? We ( educated people, not facebook antvaxxer idiots ) know exactly what should be done, but won't be. We need worldwide vaccination.

          We already have evidence of what that does... We've eliminated both smallpox and ( except in a few very limited cases where vaccines weren't allowed ) polio. Up until the idiot antivaxxers started being able to multiply we also had all-but-eradicated measels in the U.S., with cases being extremely rare and no large outbreaks. Well, that changed...

          • Sorry. I feel like I should be more explicit in what I was saying.

            How do we deal with the idiots who are putting monkey wrench into the worldwide vaccination. Secondly, now that the wrench is there and we are dealing with more mutations it's possible COVID will become more seasonal like flu (which appears to be the current case and something I argued about during the initial outbreak when people were saying it will go away in 6 months). The first is a social problem which are always the hardest. The second

    • Re:This is kinda what scares me (Score:4, Interesting)

      by quonset ( 4839537 ) on Thursday November 04, 2021 @05:12PM (#61958381)

      Youtuber Beau Of The Fifth column made a good point, folks say it's got a 99.9% survival rate, but with 330 million Americans if that's true we should have about 300k deaths. We just passed 750,000, and last I check it's still around 2000 a day.

      No, it does not have a 99.9% survival rate. Covid kills over 1% of those it infects. What does 1% mean? This lays it out [imgur.com]. If people think 750,000 dead isn't a big deal in less than two years, it would be interesting to see what they'd think of 3,300,000 people dead.

      Current daily deaths are around 1,300, down from 2,000 a few months ago. This is in large part to people getting vaccinated. The other part is from the virus slowly running out of the most vulnerable people to kill and having to work against (slightly) healthier people [californianewstimes.com].

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Teun ( 17872 )
        It's difficult to compare areas, even when so big as the USA.
        In The Netherlands on a population of +17 million and 84% fully vaccinated there are total of 18,517 dead.
        In Denmark with a population of 5.5 million and 75% fully vaccinated there are 'only' 2625 dead. These are two countries with an excellent healthcare and (superficially) similar demographic yet Denmark has consistently had around one third of the number of dead compared to The Netherlands.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by mark-t ( 151149 )
      That would suggest that the figure you heard of 99.9 percentile rate is wrong, and it's actually only 99.75 or so, with the statistics you provided.

      • Re: (Score:2, Interesting)

        by zeeky boogy doog ( 8381659 )
        Claiming either number is just an announcement that one is willfully ignorant of the most basic statistics. If the virus has killed .25% of the population, it does not have a 99.75% survival rate unless one claims it has infected the entire population, which it most certainly has not (no thanks to the best efforts of the GQP in the US).

    • Racist viruses (Score:3, Insightful)

      by flyingfsck ( 986395 )
      So Fauci sponsored the development of a racist virus. He should be deeply ashamed.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by sinij ( 911942 )
      It does not surprise me that you don't understand the difference between deaths and excessive deaths. Let me try to explain to you - a 90 year diabetic male catches COVID and dies. This counts as COVID death. It does not count as excessive death, as such person life expectancy is already negative number.

      • ! ! ! ABSOLUTELY CORRECT ! ! !

        And, anyone with half a brain - and looked at the statistics - has already noticed this.

        It's quite simply, really, we're being lied to for reasons which remain unclear, but certainly can't be defended, and bode well.

      • It does not surprise me that you got the name for excess deaths wrong, and also made up a definition that isn't actually used.

  • Risk of money coming loose. (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Ostracus ( 1354233 ) on Thursday November 04, 2021 @04:13PM (#61958235) Journal

    The findings raise the possibility of research into treatments specific to patients with this gene, though no tailored drugs are currently available.

    Step one: Test everyone for all the risk factors.
    Step two: pick one of many different treatments for all the risk factors that'll be found before this is over.
    Step three: Profit!

  • Conspiracy theorists aren't gonna like this..so does this mean China made COVID to spare Westerners and instead harm their own people?

    • If anything it suggests China made Covid to shrink its own population. If one considers the make to female ratio due to one child and a cultural preference for boys it creates a rather large potential for unrest

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by martinX ( 672498 )

        Not exactly...
        'South Asia is the southern region of Asia, which is defined in both geographical and ethno-cultural terms. The region consists of the countries of Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, Nepal, Pakistan, Sri Lanka and the Maldives.'

        IIRC, some of those areas have been giving Chairman Winnie some military trouble lately.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by ghoul ( 157158 )
      China is not South Asia. India is South Asia. So China made this to kill Indians. But then India made Delta variant which is causing havoc in China now.

  • But race and gender are social constructs! (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    They're social constructs created only by cis-het-white European males to oppress other genders and races. I leave understanding the irony of post-modern gender politics to the reader.

    I'll let the survivors of Canaan, whose men were all slaughtered by the invading Hebrews claiming their Holy Land in the story of the Rape of Dinah, to attest that there is no such thing as race and gender and it was invented entirely by the Europeans, or the celebration of Passover commemorate how the Jews were enslaved by wh

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by quenda ( 644621 )

      They're social constructs

      It can be. Someone who is 3/4 white ancestry is still black in the US. This obviously makes no sense in a medical context.
      Do medical records in the US distinguish between biological race/sex and identity? It matters sometimes for diagnosis and treatment options.

    • You can paint your face black or white and cut off or add genitalia, but you can't change biological race or biological gender. (Well... until someone invents a CRISPR for that. But that's mad science! LOL. Surely nobody would be doing that. Right? Guys? Slashdotters???)

  • My sister is a geneticist specializing in very rare gene mutations. She follows leads around the world, basically three or four cases every number of years of children that show outward symptoms of a specific gene mutation that causes mitochondria malfunctioning among other symptoms. The amount of data they gather with each DNA sample is quite vast, and techniques to analyze samples are similar to those used in data analytics using traditional machine learning methods (ie. Correlations, outlier detection,

  • As usual (Score:3)

    by groobly ( 6155920 ) on Friday November 05, 2021 @09:33AM (#61959939)

    Well, surprise, surprise, it turns out covid is racist!

  • Just another reason why a variety of workplace options should be available, including Ivermectin which our medical community doesn't like in spite of tremendous success against Covid19 elsewhere.

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