CLEVELAND — Cleveland Clinic has once again proven itself to be at the forefront of modern-day medicine and technological advances.
In a press release issued Monday, a representative for the Clinic said that its 'risk calculator' takes into account figures such as a person's age, race, ethnicity, socio-economic status, and pre-existing conditions to give an accurate estimate of the likelihood of a person testing positive for COVID-19.
“The ability to accurately predict whether or not a patient is likely to test positive for COVID-19, as well as potential outcomes including disease severity and hospitalization, will be paramount in effectively managing our resources and triaging care,” said Lara Jehi, M.D., Cleveland Clinic’s Chief Research Information Officer and corresponding author on the study. “As we continue to battle this pandemic and prepare for a potential second wave, understanding a person’s risk is the first step in potential care and treatment planning.”
The calculator is freely available to anyone who would like to use it, and was developed by Cleveland Clinic researchers with the help of over 12,000 patients enrolled in the Cleveland Clinic's COVID-19 registry.
“The data suggest some interesting correlations but do not confer cause and effect,” said Dr. Michael Kattan, Chair of Lerner Research Institute’s Department of Quantitative Health Sciences, “For example, our data do not prove that melatonin reduces your risk of testing positive for COVID-19. There may be something else about patients who take melatonin that is indeed responsible for their apparent reduced risk, and we don’t know what that is. Consumers should not change anything about their behavior based on our findings.
Other findings from the Clinic's research and development conclude that patients from lower socio-economic status are more likely to test positive for COVID-19, while patients taking melatonin, carvedilol and paroxetine are less likely to test positive for the virus.
Research also indicated that patients of Asian descent are less likely to test positive for the coronavirus than those of Caucasian descent.