Corona-undersøkelsen i Trøndelag: Risk stratification of severe COVID-19 infection in children and adults (CUT COVID-19)

The Covid-19 pandemic is caused by the virus named SARS-CoV2, a corona virus closely related to SARS. The spectrum of disease severity of Covid-19 is wide, ranging from mild symptoms in 80% of the cases, to severe illness with hospitalization in 15% of the cases. The final 5% need intensive care, typically including help to breathe. There is currently no vaccine and no treatment targeting SARS-CoV2. Treatment mainly consist of helping the patient coping with the infection and the immune response. There are important knowledge gaps in our understanding of SARS-CoV2 pathogenesis. The majority of patients that need intensive care are older or have underlying diseases. However, we do not know why some people are at higher risk of Covid-19 infection, serious complications or death. Furthermore, the host and pathogen factors that determines the severity and outcome of the infection are not understood for SARS-CoV2. With this project, we aim to adress these questions. We will establish a database consisting of all hospitalized Covid-19 patients in all ages in Mid-Norway. Furthermore, we will establish a biobank including all these patients. These efforts will make it possible to discover genetic, modifiable, microbiological, clinical and phenotypical factors that can predict disease severity and poor outcome. By including children and adults in the same clinical database and biobank, we will be able to address why children seem to be protected from developing severe disease compared to adults. Many patients will have participated in the population based HUNT and Trøndelagsundersøkelsen (>180 000) from 1984-2019, adding significant value to the proposed study. We expect this research project to result in new knowledge of Covid-19 disease that will aid clinicians in determining risk of disease and poor outcome for individual patients. Furthermore, we expect our results to be relevant in the short term (months) treatment of Covid-19 patients in Norway and globally.