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Dr. Ravindra Kolhe, Vice-Chairman of Pathology at the Medical College of Georgia at Augusta University and founder of the COVID-19 Host Genome SV Consortium explains that he founded the consortium because COVID-19 shows a split mortality where a very large number of people get infected, but only a small percentage of those get sick or die. Mortalities are associated with diabetes, hypertension and a history of heart failure, yet independent of that a seemingly random group of patients get extremely ill. Since other studies looking at host genetics use NGS or single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) arrays that are ill suited to analyze SVs, the consortium focuses on the use of OGM to detect the larger genomic variants most likely to make the largest impact.