Question:

An outbreak of betacoronavirus severe acute respiratory syndrome(SARS)-CoV-2 began in Wuhan, China in December 2019. COVID-19, thedisease associated with SARS-CoV-2 infection, rapidly spread toproduce a global pandemic. Since then many scientists around worldtry to understand the mechanism of the virus. One of the veryimportant questions that the scientists are asking is that whythere is a difference with respect to severity of the diseasebetween infected individuals. We know some factors such as peoplewith advanced age or underlying health conditions such as heartdisease and diabetes are more likely to develop severe symptoms.But those do not explain the whole story, because there are plentyof young and healthy individuals with severe symptoms or oldindividuals with underlying health conditions with mild symptoms.Why might that be? Could genetics play a role? Because we know frompast experiences that genetics is associated with susceptibility toinfectious diseases such as particular HBB variants make peopleless susceptible to malaria, or particular CCR5 variants canprotect people from HIV infection, or particular FUT2 variantsprevent people to be infected by norovirus.

So,

a) Please discuss the molecular mechanisms of the novelcoronavirus and decide which human genes are possible candidates ofmost likely to influence severity of the disease.

b) Please discuss if the geographical location could affect theseverity of the disease in terms of genetic variation andevolutionary migration patterns of humans.