Hannah E. Davis (born 1988or1989 [1] ) is an American artist, data scientist and long COVID researcher. [2] [3] She was one of the founders of the Patient-Led Research Collaborative (PLRC), a group of long COVID patients with experience in research or data analysis. [2] Research early in the COVID-19 pandemic by the PLRC mapped how a COVID-19 infection could have long-term debilitating effects, even for young and previously healthy people. It was used for the CDC's documentation on long COVID. [1]
Davis studied international relations, and later spent time in Ghana. For her masters, she studied creative communication technology at New York University. [4]
Davis's work as a generative artist focused on music, sentiment analysis and bias in datasets. [5]
A major theme of Davis's work was translating text into music, particularly generating music from the emotional data of the text. One of the projects Davis worked on turned publicly available books into music, generating music based on the emotion of the input text. Initially, her analysis was able to pick up the "rhythm" of books, for instance short sentences for Ernest Hemingway, and more flowery rhythms for work from Virginia Woolf. She built this work using a resource by Saif Mohammad, who had developed a lexicon mapping a large set of words onto eight basic emotions. The resulting tool, Transprose, created short musical pieces that mirrored the emotional tone of various novels. [4]
She used a similar algorithm to generate melodies based on news articles, which were used to collaborate with composer Mathieu Lamboley to create a symphony for a 50-person orchestra. This was performed in the Louvre in Paris, France. [6]
She was commissioned by the Italian art collective D20 to produce a piece played on a factory-turned instrument, called "Fabbrica Alta". [7] Her piece "Percival", commissioned by SynthBeats Laptop Orchestra, was a piece designed to be played by six performers and also focused on subjective interpretation of text translated into music.
In 2019, Davis co-created an installation called The Laughing Room with author Jonny Sun. They trained an AI on standup comedy transcripts from women, nonbinary, and BIPOC comedians to learn what was funny; the AI was then placed in a room with chairs and a sofa, and people could talk to it to try evoking a laughing response. [8] This was installed at the 2019 TED Conference, with additional installations at the Cambridge Public Library and The New American Festival.
Davis often presented on bias in machine learning datasets and about her own work; she regularly spoke at international art-tech festivals including Eyeo, Strange Loop, and Kikk Festival . [9] [10] In 2019, she opened the renowned Transmediale, an annual festival for art and digital culture in Berlin. [11] In September 2019, the Library of Congress invited her to speak as part of their Machine Learning + Libraries report on the state of the field, where she advocated that "a dataset is a worldview" and that "classification is violence" while urging caution in choosing input data used to train machine learning models. [12] [13]
Davis got COVID-19 in the first wave, in March 2020. [2] At this point, the public health narrative was that people either fully recovered from COVID or died. [1] Davis developed neurological issues that did not pass, including cognitive deficits (not being able to concentrate) and dysautonomia (dysfunction of the autonomic nervous system). [14] When she still had severe symptoms after three weeks and her physician attributed her symptoms to ADHD, she started to look for others experiencing the longer-term effects of COVID-19. [1]
A New York Times article by Fiona Lowenstein detailed a similar experience. [1] At this point, she joined the Body Politic COVID-19 support group founded by Lowenstein. [2] In their "data nerds" Slack channel, she connected with other people with a science or data background. Together they founded the Patient-Led Research Collaborative (PLRC). In April 2020, the PLRC collected data on people with prolonged COVID-19 symptoms, [2] and a month later they were the first to publish a report on long COVID. [1] [2]
The work done by PLRC gained prominence after Ed Yong wrote a piece on it for The Atlantic, interviewing Davis and other patient-researchers. The CDC and NIH started contacting the group to share analysis. The early CDC documentation for long COVID was informed by PLRC's analysis, especially around what was happening to young and previously healthy people. PLRC mapped how long COVID symptoms changed over time. [1]
Davis co-authored the World Health Organization's case definition of post COVID-19 condition, published in 2021. [15] She was still only able to work a couple hours per day at that point. [14] She authored and co-authored various highly cited research papers. [16] In a study published in The Lancet's subsidiary journal eClinicalMedicine, she detailed how symptoms changed over time in the first 7 months after infection. [17] She authored a 2023 review of long COVID in Nature Reviews Microbiology , co-authored by cardiologist Eric Topol. [18] In 2024, she co-authored another review of long Covid in Nature Medicine along with Eric Topol, Akiko Iwasaki, and Ziyad Al-Aly. [19]
In July 2022, she testified for the COVID-19 select committee in the US House of Representatives. [16]
Postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome (POTS) is a condition characterized by an abnormally large increase in heart rate upon sitting up or standing. POTS is a disorder of the autonomic nervous system that can lead to a variety of symptoms, including lightheadedness, brain fog, blurred vision, weakness, fatigue, headaches, heart palpitations, exercise intolerance, nausea, diminished concentration, tremulousness (shaking), syncope (fainting), coldness or pain in the extremities, numbness or tingling in the extremities, chest pain, and shortness of breath. Other conditions associated with POTS include myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome, migraine headaches, Ehlers–Danlos syndrome, asthma, autoimmune disease, vasovagal syncope, and mast cell activation syndrome. POTS symptoms may be treated with lifestyle changes such as increasing fluid, electrolyte, and salt intake, wearing compression stockings, gentle and slow postural changes, avoiding prolonged bedrest, medication, and physical therapy.
Small fiber peripheral neuropathy is a type of peripheral neuropathy that occurs from damage to the small unmyelinated and myelinated peripheral nerve fibers. These fibers, categorized as C fibers and small Aδ fibers, are present in skin, peripheral nerves, and organs. The role of these nerves is to innervate some skin sensations and help control autonomic function. It is estimated that 15–20 million people in the United States have some form of peripheral neuropathy.
Eric Jeffrey Topol is an American cardiologist, scientist, and author. He is the founder and director of the Scripps Research Translational Institute, a professor of Molecular Medicine and Executive Vice-President at Scripps Research Institute, and a senior consultant at the Division of Cardiovascular Diseases at Scripps Clinic in La Jolla, California. He has published three bestseller books on the future of medicine: The Creative Destruction of Medicine (2010), The Patient Will See You Now (2015), and Deep Medicine: How Artificial Intelligence Can Make Healthcare Human Again (2019). He was commissioned by the UK from 2018–2019 to lead planning for the National Health Service's future workforce, integrating genomics, digital medicine, and artificial intelligence.
Clinical descriptions of ME/CFS vary. Different groups have produced sets of diagnostic criteria that share many similarities. The biggest differences between criteria are whether post-exertional malaise (PEM) is required, and the number of symptoms needed.
The kynurenine pathway is a metabolic pathway leading to the production of nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide (NAD+). Metabolites involved in the kynurenine pathway include tryptophan, kynurenine, kynurenic acid, xanthurenic acid, quinolinic acid, and 3-hydroxykynurenine. The kynurenine pathway is responsible for about 95% of total tryptophan catabolism. Disruption in the pathway is associated with certain genetic and psychiatric disorders.
A doctor's visit, also known as a physician office visit or a consultation, or a ward round in an inpatient care context, is a meeting between a patient with a physician to get health advice or treatment plan for a symptom or condition, most often at a professional health facility such as a doctor's office, clinic or hospital. According to a survey in the United States, a physician typically sees between 50 and 100 patients per week, but it may vary with medical specialty, but differs only little by community size such as metropolitan versus rural areas.
Myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome (ME/CFS) is a disabling chronic illness. People with ME/CFS experience profound fatigue that does not go away with rest, sleep issues, and problems with memory or concentration. Further common symptoms include dizziness, nausea and pain. The hallmark symptom is a worsening of the illness which starts hours to days after minor physical or mental activity. This "crash" can last from hours or days to several months.
Akiko Iwasaki is a Sterling Professor of Immunobiology and Molecular, Cellular and Developmental Biology at Yale University. She is also a principal investigator at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. Her research interests include innate immunity, autophagy, inflammasomes, sexually transmitted infections, herpes simplex virus, human papillomavirus, respiratory virus infections, influenza infection, T cell immunity, commensal bacteria, COVID-19, and long COVID.
Post-exertional malaise (PEM), sometimes referred to as post-exertional symptom exacerbation (PESE) or post-exertional neuroimmune exhaustion (PENE), is a worsening of symptoms that occurs after minimal exertion. It is the hallmark symptom of myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome (ME/CFS) and common in long COVID and fibromyalgia. PEM is often severe enough to be disabling, and is triggered by ordinary activities that healthy people tolerate. Typically, it begins 12–48 hours after the activity that triggers it, and lasts for days, but this is highly variable and may persist much longer. Management of PEM is symptom-based, and patients are recommended to pace their activities to avoid triggering PEM.
Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) is a contagious disease caused by the coronavirus SARS-CoV-2. The first known case was identified in Wuhan, China, in December 2019. Most scientists believe the SARS-CoV-2 virus entered into human populations through natural zoonosis, similar to the SARS-CoV-1 and MERS-CoV outbreaks, and consistent with other pandemics in human history. Social and environmental factors including climate change, natural ecosystem destruction and wildlife trade increased the likelihood of such zoonotic spillover. The disease quickly spread worldwide, resulting in the COVID-19 pandemic.
The UK Coronavirus Cancer Programme or UKCCP is one of the longest running UK pandemic research programmes to safeguard, monitor and protect individuals living with cancer from COVID-19 across the United Kingdom.
Sherry Hsiang-Yi Chou is a Canadian neurologist and an Associate Professor of Neurology and Chief of Neurocritical Care at the Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine and Northwestern Medicine. She is a Fellow of the Neurocritical Care Society and the Society of Critical Care Medicine. During the COVID-19 pandemic Chou assembled a worldwide team of physicians and scientists to better understand the neurological impacts of COVID-19, forming the Global Consortium Study of Neurologic Dysfunction in COVID-19 (GCS-NeuroCOVID). The first report of this large, multicenter, multicontinent consortium found that neurological manifestations are present in 8 out of 10 adult patients hospitalized with COVID-19 and are associated with increased mortality.
The symptoms of COVID-19 are variable depending on the type of variant contracted, ranging from mild symptoms to a potentially fatal illness. Common symptoms include coughing, fever, loss of smell (anosmia) and taste (ageusia), with less common ones including headaches, nasal congestion and runny nose, muscle pain, sore throat, diarrhea, eye irritation, and toes swelling or turning purple, and in moderate to severe cases, breathing difficulties. People with the COVID-19 infection may have different symptoms, and their symptoms may change over time.
The Zoe Health Study, formerly the COVID Symptom Study, is a health research project of British company Zoe Limited which uses a mobile app that runs on Android and iOS.
The treatment and management of COVID-19 combines both supportive care, which includes treatment to relieve symptoms, fluid therapy, oxygen support as needed, and a growing list of approved medications. Highly effective vaccines have reduced mortality related to SARS-CoV-2; however, for those awaiting vaccination, as well as for the estimated millions of immunocompromised persons who are unlikely to respond robustly to vaccination, treatment remains important. Some people may experience persistent symptoms or disability after recovery from the infection, known as long COVID, but there is still limited information on the best management and rehabilitation for this condition.
The transmission of COVID-19 is the passing of coronavirus disease 2019 from person to person. COVID-19 is mainly transmitted when people breathe in air contaminated by droplets/aerosols and small airborne particles containing the virus. Infected people exhale those particles as they breathe, talk, cough, sneeze, or sing. Transmission is more likely the closer people are. However, infection can occur over longer distances, particularly indoors.
Long COVID or long-haul COVID is a group of health problems persisting or developing after an initial period of COVID-19 infection. Symptoms can last weeks, months or years and are often debilitating. The World Health Organization defines long COVID as starting three months after the initial COVID-19 infection, but other agencies define it as starting at four weeks after the initial infection.
There is increasing evidence suggesting that COVID-19 causes both acute and chronic neurologicalor psychological symptoms. Caregivers of COVID-19 patients also show a higher than average prevalence of mental health concerns. These symptoms result from multiple different factors.
Ziyad Al-Aly is an American physician and clinical epidemiologist who is currently Director of the Clinical Epidemiology Center and Chief of the Research and Development at the Veterans Affairs St. Louis Health Care System. He is also a clinical epidemiologist at Washington University in St. Louis. He has led multiple studies on long covid and its sequelae.
Post-acute infection syndromes (PAISs) or post-infectious syndromes are medical conditions characterized by symptoms attributed to a prior infection. While it is commonly assumed that people either recover or die from infections, long-term symptoms—or sequelae—are a possible outcome as well. Examples include long COVID, Myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome (ME/CFS), and post-Ebola virus syndrome. Common symptoms include post-exertional malaise (PEM), severe fatigue, neurocognitive symptoms, flu-like symptoms, and pain. The pathology of most of these conditions is not understood and management is generally symptomatic.