When the novel coronavirus led to a global pandemic last year, doctors and researchers rushed to learn as much as possible about the virus and how our bodies respond to it.
They needed a lot of information, and they needed it fast. Doctors studied whether available medicines could effectively treat the symptoms of COVID-19. Virologists, biologists, and chemists scrambled to understand how the virus affects the molecular workings of cells, information key to designing medicine to treat infection and resulting disease.
Medical and biological data flowed fast and furiously. More than four percent of the world’s research published in 2020 was related to COVID, according to the Dimensions database produced by Digital Science. Yet each study provided just a piece of insight into the massive biological puzzle that defines this severe respiratory syndrome