New York: A standard test that assesses blood cells can identify which patients admitted to hospital with Covid-19 could face a high risk of becoming critical and die, say researchers.
“We wanted to help find ways to identify high-risk Covid patients as early and as easily as possible — who are likely to become severely ill and which hospitalized patients are likely to get worse quickly,” said study researcher John M Higgins from the Massachusetts General Hospital in the US.
Higgins noted that early reports from China indicated that the body’s inflammatory response was extremely intense in some patients and very mild in others.
His own group’s previous work revealed that certain changes in the numbers and types of blood cells during inflammation are associated with poor health outcomes in patients with diseases such as heart disease, cancer, and diabetes.
“We quickly…
