- The consumer genomics company 23andMe has launched a new interactive tool called the COVID-19 Severity Calculator.
- The tool offers insights into some risk factors for hospitalization from COVID-19, but the company notes that it’s not intended to predict an individual user’s risk and doesn’t take into account genetic risk factors.
- The tool doesn’t take into account all the possible risk factors that can affect how the disease develops.
The COVID-19 pandemic has hit some Americans particularly hard.
Older adults, people with certain preexisting health conditions, and members of ethnic and racial minorities are more likely than others to develop serious symptoms of the disease. They’ve faced higher rates of hospitalization and higher rates of death from COVID-19.
To help community members learn how certain risk factors affect the chances of hospitalization in people who’ve developed COVID-19, the consumer genomics company 23andMe has launched a new interactive tool called the COVID-19 Severity Calculator.
“It’s interesting because it turns every citizen who looks at it into a bit of an investigator,” said Dr. Robert C. Green, MPH, a medical geneticist and physician-scientist at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, Massachusetts.
“You can change the age, you can change the body mass index, you can change the ethnicity and see how it influences the risk of hospitalization,” he continued.
The tool offers insights into some of the risk factors for hospitalization from COVID-19, but the company notes that it’s not intended to predict an individual user’s risk and doesn’t take into account genetic risk factors. The tool does not take into account all of the possible risk factors that can affect how the disease develops.
“We created the Severity Calculator because people who have visited 23andMe’s COVID-19 Information Center have consistently been asking for more information about the severity of the virus infection and what factors into why it impacts some people harder than others,” Janie F. Shelton, PhD, MPH, a senior scientist at 23andMe, said in a company press release
Source: healthline