Hyderabad-based Council of Scientific and Industrial Research’s Centre For Cellular And Molecular Biology, and Varanasi’s Banaras Hindu University (BHU) have released a study which finds that isolated communities such as the Ongos and Jarawa living in the Andaman and Nicobar Islands face a greater generic risk of COVID-19 infection.
Professor Gyaneshwar Chaubey of the BHU has said that some estimates can be made about the impact of COVID-19 on these isolated tribal communities, although this is the first time that genomic data has been used for research on 227 such groups.
It was found that those people with long homozygotic segments in their genome are highly susceptible to COVID-19. The high density genome data of 1600 individuals from 227 such groups was studied, and it emerged that the Ongo and Jarawa tribes showed a high frequency of COVID-19 risk alleles.
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