When the pandemic began, medical workers knew very little about how to take care of patients — including who might have the greatest risk of getting seriously ill.
For other illnesses, healthcare workers are used to having information that helps determine which patients might need the most care and support. "We didn’t have any evidence, and that’s a scary place for anyone to be in," says Nicholas Tatonetti, a biomedical informatics researcher at Columbia University. So, researchers around the world dove into the data hospitals were collecting on their COVID-19 patients to figure out what traits and qualities might predict how sick individuals became.
