Review
Version 1
Preserved in Portico This version is not peer-reviewed
COVID-19: The Ethno-Geographic Perspective of Differential Immunity
Version 1
: Received: 27 December 2022 / Approved: 30 December 2022 / Online: 30 December 2022 (10:00:27 CET)
A peer-reviewed article of this Preprint also exists.
Abdullah, U.; Saleh, N.; Shaw, P.; Jalal, N. COVID-19: The Ethno-Geographic Perspective of Differential Immunity. Vaccines 2023, 11, 319. Abdullah, U.; Saleh, N.; Shaw, P.; Jalal, N. COVID-19: The Ethno-Geographic Perspective of Differential Immunity. Vaccines 2023, 11, 319.
Abstract
Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19), the emissary behind the worst global pandemic of the 21st century, is primarily a respiratory disease-causing virus called SARS-CoV-2 which is responsible for millions of new cases (incidence) and deaths (mortalities), worldwide. Many factors have played a role in the differential morbidity and mortality experienced by nations and ethnicities against SARS-CoV-2, such as the quality of primary medical health facilities or enabling economies. Nevertheless, the most important variable, i.e., the subsequent ability of individuals to be immunologically sensitive or resistant to the infection, was not properly discussed before. Therefore, an astounding issue arose when some developed countries experienced higher morbidity and mortality, compared with their relatively underdeveloped counterparts, despite having excellent medical health facilities. Hence this investigative review attempts to analyze the issue from an angle of previously undiscussed genetic, epigenetic, and molecular immune resistance mechanisms in correlation with the pathophysiology of SARS-CoV-2 and varied ethnicity-based immunological responses against it. The biological factors discussed here include the overall landscape of human microbiota, endogenous retroviral genes spliced into the human genome, copy number variation, and how they could modulate the innate and adaptive immune systems, which put a particular ethnic genetic architecture at a higher risk of SARS-CoV-2 infection than others. Considering an array of these factors in their entirety may help explain the geographic disparity of disease incidence, severity, and subsequent mortality associated with the disease while at the same time encouraging scientists to design new experimental approaches to investigation.
Keywords
COVID-19; copy number variation (CNV); virome; microbiome; endoretroviral genome (ERV); geographic disparity
Subject
Biology and Life Sciences, Immunology and Microbiology
Copyright: This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Comments (0)
We encourage comments and feedback from a broad range of readers. See criteria for comments and our Diversity statement.
Leave a public commentSend a private comment to the author(s)
* All users must log in before leaving a comment
