On Nov. 5, 2021, scientists at Oxford University announced they had identified the gene responsible for doubling the risk of respiratory failure from COVID-19.

Sixty percent of people with South Asian ancestry carry the high-risk genetic signal, partly explaining the excess deaths seen in some UK communities, and the impact of COVID-19 in the Indian subcontinent. Previous work has already identified a stretch of DNA on chromosome 3 which doubled the risk of adults under 65 of dying from COVID. However, scientists did not know how this genetic signal worked to increase the risk, nor the exact genetic change that was responsible. The study results were published in Nature Genetics.