Abstract: PLOS ONE RESEARCH ARTICLE Clinical, regional, and genetic characteristics of Covid-19 patients from UK Biobank David A. Kolin ID1,2☯*, Scott Kulm1,2☯, Paul J. Christos3, Olivier Elemento1,2 1 The Meyer Cancer Center, Weill Cornell Medicine, Caryl and Israel Englander Institute for Precision Medicine, New York, NY, United States of America, 2 Department of Physiology and Biophysics, Weill Cornell Medicine, New York, NY, United States of America, 3 Department of Population Health Sciences, Weill Cornell Medicine, New York, NY, United States of America a1111111111 a1111111111 a1111111111 a1111111111 a1111111111 OPEN ACCESS Citation: Kolin DA, Kulm S, Christos PJ, Elemento O (2020) Clinical, regional, and genetic characteristics of Covid-19 patients from UK Biobank. PLoS ONE 15(11): e0241264. https://doi. org/10.1371/journal.pone.0241264 Editor: Sreeram V. Ramagopalan, University of Oxford, UNITED KINGDOM Received: August 6, 2020 Accepted: October 12, 2020 Published: November 17, 2020 Copyright: © 2020 Kolin et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. Data Availability Statement: All data used for this study were obtained from the UK Biobank. Data requests may be sent via https://urldefense. proofpoint.com/v2/url?u=https-3A__www. ukbiobank.ac.uk_principles-2Dof-2Daccess_&d= DwIGaQ&c=lb62iw4YL4RFalcE2hQUQealT9RXrryqt9KZX2qu2s&r=emeY7OEhMRMUYvaB lIQYiCIjDZ1mhvSZ60GkRC5Srzc&m=cJaZ7BOL3FOaMbcCRxa9NVCPhPzFwQdIYYHV3RjnZ8&s= EZ8e5hVazSLARKaJF7NIdwBPJcKfRn9SlngrTOU8 TKw&e=. The authors of the present study had no special access privileges in accessing these ☯ These authors contributed equally to this work. * dak4001@med.cornell.edu Abstract Background Coronavirus disease 2019 (Covid-19) has rapidly infected millions of people worldwide. Recent studies suggest that racial minorities and patients with comorbidities are at higher risk of Covid-19. In this study, we analyzed the effects of clinical, regional, and genetic factors on Covid-19 positive status. Methods The UK Biobank is a longitudinal cohort study that recruited participants from 2006 to 2010 from throughout the United Kingdom. Covid-19 test results were provided to UK Biobank starting on March 16, 2020. The main outcome measure in this study was Covid-19 positive status, determined by the presence of any positive test for a single individual. Clinical risk factors were derived from UK Biobank at baseline, and regional risk factors were imputed using census features local to each participant’s home zone. We used robust adjusted Poisson regression with clustering by testing laboratory to estimate relative risk. Blood types were derived using genetic variants rs8176719 and rs8176746, and genomewide tests of association were conducted using logistic-Firth hybrid regression. Results This prospective cohort study included 397,064 UK Biobank participants, of whom 968 tested positive for Covid-19. The unadjusted relative risk of Covid-19 for Black participants was 3.66 (95% CI 2.83–4.74), compared to White participants. Adjusting for Townsend deprivation index alone reduced the relative risk to 2.44 (95% CI 1.86–3.20). Comorbidities that significantly increased Covid-19 risk included chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (adjusted relative risk [ARR] 1.64, 95% CI 1.18–2.27), ischemic heart..