DETROIT – It's a question that has vexed researchers from the beginning of the coronavirus outbreak: Why do some people get severely ill and die from COVID-19, while others have mild symptoms or none at all.

With 16 million people who've already spit in vials and sent them to Ancestry for genetic testing to find blood relatives who might be closely or distantly related or learn how much of their DNA suggests their relatives came from Africa or Asia or were Native American or European, Ball said the company knew it had a potentially useful data pool to tap for COVID-19 research. .

"We clearly want to take the opportunity to unleash that power to be able to see if there are genetic signals, and be able to help researchers and people making drugs and therapeutics and vaccines do smarter work faster," she said.

At 23andMe, principal scientist Adam Auton said the California-based company's COVID-19 genome-wide association study launched in April.

About 10 million of its genotype customers are eligible for the study, he said. Of them, about 80% have consented to participate in research, and 600,000 customers have opted into the COVID-19 study. .

"It is a really quite tremendous response to the study and I think shows that people really do want to try and contribute to help understand and fight this disease," said Auton.

"We're really hoping to get a minimum of a million respondents because we need to have a decent number of people who have tested positive to give us a statistical signal.".

"However, it's the nature of genetic studies that we really need very large numbers of people to be able to draw connections between the genetic information and people's health information.".

Since the pandemic began, about 1.6 million people in the United States, a country of 330 million, have tested positive for COVID-19

As the virus continues to spread, and more people get coronavirus diagnoses, the companies suspect that the number of people who will go on to enroll in their studies also is likely to rise. 

To expand its research of people who've had COVID-19 even more, Auton said 23andMe is now offering to mail a free DNA test kit to any U.S adult who was hospitalized with COVID-19, but has not yet submitted a DNA sample to the company. 

"We are essentially asking if people have been hospitalized with COVID-19, and they have recovered, if they would like to participate in our research

Ball said Ancestry also will seek to publish its COVID-19 research findings, too

Auton said the research could lead to therapies or treatments for people sickened by COVID-19