At the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, public health authorities first had to identify and draw attention to common signs and symptoms of the disease.
On Feb. 25, 2020, with 14 cases having been diagnosed in the U.S., the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) initially went with fever, cough and shortness of breath. This brief official list of coronavirus disease symptoms remained unchanged until mid-April.
Last spring at Vanderbilt University Medical Center, natural language processing of clinical notes from the electronic health records (EHRs) of people tested for COVID-19 had turned up loss of taste or smell as a symptom of the disease by April 5, nearly two weeks before the CDC added this symptom to the official list on April 17.
In setting out in the early days of the pandemic to identify clinical characteristics of COVID-19, Juan Zhao, PhD, Wei-Qi Wei, MD, PhD, and colleagues used a new method they call concept-wide association study, or conceptWAS, to analyze clinical notes of 19,692 adult patients who received COVID testing at VUMC between March 8 and May 27, 2020.