• diabetes mellitus, type 2

On 31 December 2019, several clusters of an unusual pneumonia were reported in Wuhan, China.1 Analysis of five patient samples identified the causative agent as the novel severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), an enveloped positive-sense RNA virus that is 96% identical at the whole genome level to a bat coronavirus2 and was later named 2019 novel coronavirus.2 3The clinical manifestations of the pneumonia have ranged from mild lower respiratory tract symptoms to the more severe manifestations of acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS) and associated high mortality,4 and the new disease has been named 2019 coronavirus disease or covid-19 by the WHO.3 The USA reported its first case on 20 January 2020 in Washington.5 By 11 March 2020, the WHO declared covid-19 a pandemic with over 118 000 cases in 114 countries and 4291 deaths.6 As of 6 April 2020, there were over 1 210 965 cases worldwide with 67 594 deaths. Of those, the USA has made up 330 891 confirmed cases and over 8910 deaths.7

Diabetes mellitus is consistently one of the most common comorbidities found in patients with covid-19. Guan et al 8 showed that approximately 7% of the patients with covid-19 had diabetes as a comorbidity. However, the prevalence of diabetes was almost threefold higher in covid-19 patients with severe disease (16.2%) as compared with those with non-severe disease (5.7%). Zhou et al 9 showed that diabetes was an associated comorbidity …