New cancer patients — especially Black people — are more susceptible to severe Covid-19 infections
Recently diagnosed cancer patients are more vulnerable to Covid-19 infection and face more severe illness than people without cancer, a risk that is significantly higher for Black people than for white people with both diseases, a large new analysis concludes.
Deploying artificial intelligence to comb through 73 million Americans’ electronic health records, researchers discovered that people who learned they had leukemia, non-Hodgkin lymphoma, or lung cancer in the past year were at the greatest risk for Covid-19 infection compared to those without cancer or those whose cancers had been diagnosed longer ago. For Black people with cancer, the risk of Covid-19 infection was highest in patients who had breast, prostate, colorectal, or lung cancer.
