COVID-19: Repositioning nutrition research for the next pandemic

Jaggers, Grayson K.; Watkins, Bruce A.; Rodriguez, Raymond L.

At the time of this writing, the COVID-19 pandemic will have infected more than 12 million people and taken the lives of nearly 600,000 individuals world-wide [1]. While containment and treatment strategies have focused primarily on social distancing, therapeutics, and vaccines, the pandemic has also revealed serious underlying vulnerabilities in individuals infected by the coronavirus, SARS-CoV-2. The vulnerable aspects include advanced age, obesity [and its comorbidities, diabetes and chronic heart diseases], systemic coagulopathy or thrombosis [2], acute respiratory failure (e.g., hypoxia), inflammation, immunodeficiency, and neuropathologies [3,4]. The evidence for vulnerable people is supported by early reports on the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States that revealed ethnic, racial, and socio-economic disparities that resulted in some sectors of the population being disproportionally affected by COVID-19. Some of the sectors showing disproportionate rates of infection and death included men, American Indians, Alaska Natives, Blacks, Latinos, older adults, recent immigrants, and individuals with low income [5,6]. What is largely missed by the public, researchers, and healthcare providers is how nutrition and food intersect with this multiplicity of COVID-19 symptoms and disparities, in different ways and to different degrees.