(May 5): When Ziyad Al-Aly’s research team told him how often diabetes appeared to strike Covid-19 survivors, he thought the data must be wrong, so he asked his five colleagues to crunch the numbers again.
Weeks later, they returned the same findings after sifting through millions of patient records. By then Al-Aly had also gone digging into the scientific literature and was starting to come to terms with an alarming reality: Covid-19 isn’t just deadlier for people with diabetes, it’s also triggering the metabolic disease in many who didn’t previously have it.
“It took a while to convince me,” said Al-Aly, who directs the clinical epidemiology center at the Veterans Affairs St. Louis Health Care System in Missouri. “It was hard to believe that Covid could be doing this.”
When Ziyad Al-Aly’s research team told him how often diabetes appeared to strike Covid-19 survivors, he thought the data must be wrong, so he asked his five colleagues to crunch the numbers again. Weeks later, they returned the same findings after sifting through millions of patient records. By then Al-Aly had also gone digging into the scientific literature and was starting to come to terms with an alarming reality: Covid-19 isn’t just deadlier for people with diabetes, it’s also triggering the metabolic disease in many who didn’t previously have it. “It took a while to convince me,” said Al-Aly, who directs the clinical epidemiology center at the Veterans Affairs St. Louis Health Care System in Missouri. “It was hard to believe that Covid could be doing this.”