Immune health grades: Finding resilience in the COVID-19 pandemic and beyond

• Authors: Vincent Marconi, Emory University; Venkatesh Krishnan, Eli Lilly and Company, Indianapolis; Wesley Ely, Vanderbilt University; Monty Montano, Harvard Medical School
• Journal Title: JOURNAL OF ALLERGY AND CLINICAL IMMUNOLOGY
• Volume: Volume 149, Number 2
• Publisher: MOSBY-ELSEVIER | 2022-02-01, Pages 565-568
• Type of Work: Article | Final Publisher PDF
• Publisher DOI: http://doi.org/10.1016/j.jaci.2021.10.025
• Subjects: Health Sciences, Public Health; Health Sciences, Health Care Management
• Keywords: Science & Technology; Life Sciences & Biomedicine; Allergy; Immunology; Immunologic resilience; COVID-19; aging; HIV; influenza

Abstract

With more than 225 million cases of SARS-CoV-2 infection and more than 4,650,000 deaths from COVID-19 worldwide, identifying those individuals at risk of severe disease becomes an incredibly valuable pursuit when resources are limited and medical care is costly. Several COVID-19 risk measures, including the Veterans Health Administration COVID-19 (VACO) Index for COVID-19 Mortality,1 have demonstrated substantial predictive capacity for severe COVID-19 and death. This well-validated index utilizes age, sex, and preexisting comorbidities to estimate risk of 30-day mortality in inpatients and outpatients after SARS-CoV2 infection. COVID-19 has enabled the scientific community to reexamine risk stratification with a comprehensive vision of disease susceptibility that leverages deep immunologic data.