Not long after COVID-19 struck Milan, Italy, in early 2020 with devastating effects, Paolo Fiorina, an endocrinologist at the Università degli Studi di Milano, was heading into his workplace at Sacco Hospital when a pathologist there contacted him about patients she had examined who had recently died of the disease. All of the deceased—not just those with diabetes—had had high blood sugar levels, known as hyperglycemia. Fiorina says his first thought was that there must have been a mistake. “Diabetic patients are more prone to die of COVID-19 as compared to the nondiabetic ones, so I thought this could be the cause,” he explains, but that wouldn’t explain why the metabolically healthy individuals had also been hyperglycemic when they died.
Fiorina went through the records of the deceased patients and checked out the medical records for some other people admitted to the hospital with COVID-19, and soon realized that an ...
