Friedberg @ 01:05:17Right
healthscience
By roughly two years after May 2020 (around May 2022), scientists will still not have a detailed, reliable mapping from individual human genotype and health status to predicted clinical outcome for SARS-CoV-2 infection; i.e., precision predictions of how this coronavirus affects a specific person based on their genes and health will still not exist.
We are very like like with any virus, we know very little about how it affects a specific human based on their genotype. Meaning based on your health and your your genes. Here's what this virus is going to do to your body. And we're not going to know that in two years.View on YouTube
Explanation
By May 2022 (two years after May 2020), researchers had identified some genetic loci associated with COVID-19 susceptibility and severity, but these explained only a small fraction of outcome variability and did not enable precise, individual-level predictions of clinical course.
Key points:
- A large 2021 Nature paper from the COVID-19 Host Genetics Initiative reported 13 loci associated with infection or severe COVID-19, and explicitly noted that “much remains unknown about the genetic basis of susceptibility to SARS‑CoV‑2 and severity of COVID‑19.” (nature.com) This falls well short of a detailed genotype→outcome map.
- A comprehensive May 2022 review on The human genetic epidemiology of COVID‑19 found that polygenic scores (PS/PRS) for COVID-19 were weakly powered, with most variation explained by a few major signals (e.g., the 3p21.31 locus), and concluded that clinical application of such scores for SARS‑CoV‑2 susceptibility or severity was unlikely in the short term. The paper emphasized that PS might be useful for research but not for routine clinical prediction. (pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov)
- Early and subsequent PRS studies for COVID‑19 severity showed limited discriminative performance: one study reported an AUC ~0.51 (essentially no clinical utility), explicitly concluding they could not create a clinically useful genetic test. (humgenomics.biomedcentral.com) Later work using more sophisticated PRS improved AUC only modestly (e.g., from 0.68 to 0.71 when adding a genome-wide PRS), underscoring that genetics added some risk stratification but still lacked strong individual-level predictive power. (cambridge.org)
- A 2023 analysis of polygenic scores for COVID‑19, drawing on Host Genetics Initiative data, similarly found that while genetic associations were statistically robust, they had limited predictive value for translational/clinical settings, with most predictive power coming from simple epidemiologic risk factors rather than genotype. (pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov)
Together, these sources show that even by and shortly after May 2022, the field had:
- Only a partial list of risk loci with modest effect sizes; and
- No clinically reliable, fine-grained mapping from an individual’s genotype and health profile to a precise predicted COVID‑19 outcome.
That matches Friedberg’s prediction that “we’re not going to know that in two years”—i.e., we still would not have a detailed, reliable genotype→clinical‑outcome map for SARS‑CoV‑2 by roughly May 2022.