Table 1.

Differential expression of chemokine receptors for carriers of the major genetic risk factor for COVID-19

	eQTLgen	eQTL cat.	NES (eQTL cat.)	P value (eQTL cat.)	P value (eQTLgen)
Whole blood
CCR1	↓	↓	−0.10	1.8e-2	8.7e-14
CCR2	↓	↓	−0.05	3.4e-2	5.0e-7
CCR3	↓	↓	−0.31	8.3e-7	8.8e-47
CCR5	↓	↓	−0.05	1.7e-1	1.6e-7
CCR9	↑	↑	+0.13	2.6e-2	2.7e-7
CXCR6	↓	↓	−0.16	1.2e-3	7.9e-44
CCR5		eQTL cat.	NES (eQTL cat.)	P value	Study ref.
Macrophages		↓	−1.15	7.1e-5	19
Monocytes		↓	−0.59	1.7e-3	20
Memory T-follicular helper cells		↓	−1.09	5.4e-3	21
Memory T helper 2 cells		↓	−0.76	8.7e-3	21
Memory T helper 1 cells		↓	−0.34	2.6e-2	21
Monocytes		↓	−0.31	3.1e-2	22
CD8+ T cells		↓	−0.69	5.3e-2	21
Macrophages		↓	−0.24	5.5e-2	23
Memory T helper 1/17 cells		↓	−0.24	1.5e-1	21
NK cells		↓	−0.42	1.6e-1	21
Monocytes		↓	−0.20	2.1e-1	21
CD16+ Monocytes		↓	−0.45	3.4e-1	21
T cells		↓	−0.16	4.0e-1	20
Memory T regulatory cells		↓	−0.07	6.2e-1	21
T cells		↓	−0.07	6.6e-1	24
T regulatory cells		↓	−0.10	7.4e-1	21
Memory T helper 17 cells		↓	−0.004	9.8e-1	21

Downward arrow and negative normalized effect sizes (NES) represent reduced expression for carriers of the COVID-19 risk allele at rs17713054. NES available from the eQTL catalog. The risk allele for COVID-19 is associated with reduced expression of all receptors except CCR9 in whole blood. Expression data from whole blood aggregated by the eQTLGen Consortium includes 26,000 to 31,569 samples, whereas the eQTL catalog comprises 1,331 whole blood samples (meta-analyzed using inverse-variance weighting of the contributing studies). CCR5 is down-regulated in all investigated immunological cell types (19–24). For CCR5 in macrophages, the NES translates to an allelic fold change of ∼3.7 (log₂) based on the transcript levels (19).