Strong Correlation between the Case Fatality Rate of COVID-19 and the rs6598045 Single Nucleotide Polymorphism (SNP) of the Interferon-Induced Transmembrane Protein 3 () Gene at the Population-Level.

Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) is a fatal pandemic disease that is caused by infection with severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2). As of 13 December, 2020, over 70,000,000 cases and 1,500,000 deaths have been reported over a period of several months; however, the mechanism underlying the pathogenesis of COVID-19 has not been elucidated. To identify the novel risk genetic biomarker for COVID-19, we evaluated the correlation between the case fatality rate of COVID-19 and the genetic polymorphisms of several potential COVID-19-related genes, including interferon-induced transmembrane protein 3 (), the angiotensin I converting enzyme 2 () gene, transmembrane protease, serine 2 (), interleukin 6 (), leucine zipper transcription factor-like protein 1 (), and the genes, in various ethnic groups. We obtained the number of COVID-19 cases and deaths from the World Health Organization (WHO) COVID-19 dashboard and calculated the case fatality rate of each ethnic group. In addition, we obtained the allele distribution of the polymorphisms of the and genes from the 1000 Genomes Project and performed Log-linear regression analysis using SAS version 9.4. We found different COVID-19 case fatality rates in each ethnic group. Notably, we identified a strong correlation between the case fatality rate of COVID-19 and the allele frequency of the rs6598045 single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) of the gene. To the best of our knowledge, this report is the first to describe a strong correlation between the COVID-19 case fatality rate and the rs6598045 SNP of the gene at the population-level.