key: cord-0703597-v9hlgi1d authors: Tanaka, Hiromu; Lee, Ho; Morita, Atsuho; Namkoong, Ho; Chubachi, Shotaro; Kabata, Hiroki; Kamata, Hirofumi; Ishii, Makoto; Hasegawa, Naoki; Harada, Norihiro; Ueda, Tetsuya; Ueda, Soichiro; Ishiguro, Takashi; Arimura, Ken; Saito, Fukuki; Yoshiyama, Takashi; Nakano, Yasushi; Mutoh, Yoshikazu; Suzuki, Yusuke; Murakami, Koji; Okada, Yukinori; Koike, Ryuji; Kitagawa, Yuko; Tokunaga, Katsushi; Kimura, Akinori; Imoto, Seiya; Miyano, Satoru; Ogawa, Seishi; Kanai, Takanori; Fukunaga, Koichi title: Clinical Characteristics of Patients with Coronavirus Disease (COVID-19): Preliminary Baseline Report of Japan COVID-19 Task Force, a Nation-wide Consortium to Investigate Host Genetics of COVID-19 date: 2021-09-30 journal: Int J Infect Dis DOI: 10.1016/j.ijid.2021.09.070 sha: ef7670f32fb0ddd9dd4ea785e0ca3a1581a0518e doc_id: 703597 cord_uid: v9hlgi1d Background and design The coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic is having a devastating effect worldwide. Host genome differences between populations may influence the severity of COVID-19. The Japan COVID-19 Task Force is conducting host genome analysis of hospitalized patients with COVID-19 from more than 70 institutions nationwide in Japan. This report describes the clinical characteristics of patients enrolled to date. Results The median (interquartile range) age of the 1674 patients included in the analysis was 59 (45–71) years, and more than half of the patients (66.2%) were male. Less than half of the patients (41.2%) had severe disease. The case fatality rate was 3.2%. Conclusions Since this is a hospital-based study, the number of severe cases was relatively high, but the case fatality rate was relatively low, when compared to that of other countries. In the future, we will continue to enroll patients and conduct genome analyses of patients with COVID-19. The coronavirus disease pandemic has had a devastating effect worldwide, including in Japan (see https://www.mhlw.go.jp/stf/covid-19/kokunainohasseijoukyou.html). Host genome differences between populations may influence disease severity. This may explain why Asians, including Japanese, may have a lower risk of death (Price-Haywood EG et al., 2020; Zeberg H et al., 2020) . The Japan COVID-19 Task Force was established in early 2020 as a nationwide multicenter consortium. We collected and analyzed clinical specimens from patients in more than 70 institutions nationwide since February 2020 and reported the results of a genome-wide association study (Namkoong H et al., 2021) . Clinical characteristic of patients in this study were similar to those of other previously reported large-sample studies in Asian populations (Guan WJ et al., 2020; Matsunaga N et al., 2020) . The proportion of male patients was higher in this study than in other studies, which may be due to the relatively high disease severity in males (Chen N et al., 2020) . The proportion of patients with comorbidities such as hypertension, diabetes, and chronic kidney disease, was higher than that reported in another registry in Japan (Matsunaga N et al., 2020) . We believe that this finding is due to a large number of patients registered in the 12 third epidemic, unlike the situation in the previously reported registry. Our study suggests that the number of hospitalized older male patients with more comorbidities has gradually increased in Japan during the past year. Compared with the recent meta-analyses in other countries (Macedo A et al., 2021) , we believe that the lower fatality rate in this study and in the previous report (Matsunaga N et al., 2020) may be explained by reasons specific to Japan. We consider the possibility that many inpatient cases of our study would have been treated as outpatients in other countries, because in Japan, the public health centers coordinated the hospitalization of many patients, including those with mild disease. The low fatality rate may also reflect the unique genetic characteristics of the Japanese. For example, the effect of DOCK2 on disease severity of COVID-19 has been reported (Namkoong H et al., 2021) . Our study had a large group of patients treated with remdesivir, especially in the third epidemic. A relatively high proportion of patients were treated with systemic corticosteroids, based on the results of the RECOVERY trial (Horby P et al., 2021) . These treatments may have resulted in lower fatality rate in this study than that in previous reports. With This study was approved by the ethics committee of Keio University School of Medicine (20200061) and affiliated institutes. The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper. National Hospital Organization Tokyo National Hospital Abbreviations: BMI, body mass index KL-6, Krebs von den Lungen-6 Epidemiological and clinical characteristics of 99 cases of 2019 novel coronavirus pneumonia in Wuhan, China: a descriptive study Clinical Characteristics of Coronavirus Disease 2019 in China Dexamethasone in Hospitalized Patients with Covid-19 COVID-19 fatality rates in hospitalized patients: systematic review and meta-analysis Clinical epidemiology of hospitalized patients with COVID-19 in Japan: Report of the COVID-19 REGISTRY JAPAN Situation Report Japan COVID-19 Task Force: a nation-wide consortium to elucidate host genetics of COVID-19 pandemic in Japan Hospitalization and Mortality among Black Patients and White Patients with Covid-19 Novel Coronavirus: COVID-19 Therapeutic Trial Synopsis The major genetic risk factor for severe COVID-19 is inherited from Neanderthals