Unless and until the findings we present here are clinically validated, they should not be employed for any clinical purposes. However, we do at this juncture recommend integrating HLA testing into clinical trials and pairing HLA typing with COVID-19 testing where feasible to more rapidly develop and deploy a predictor(s) of viral severity in the population and, potentially, to tailor future vaccination strategies to genotypically at-risk populations. This approach may have additional implications for the management of a broad array of other viruses.