“Once somebody develops a treatment for the virus, everything will go away,” said Daniel Batlle, a kidney expert from Northwestern Medicine and professor of medicine at Northwestern University in Chicago. Even after a vaccine is developed, treatments that save lives and prevent hospitalization will be crucial. Vaccines might not work for everyone and doses may initially be limited.

Dr. Wendy Goodall McDonald, a board-certified obstetrician and gynecologist at Northwestern Medicine and the medical influencer behind DrEveryWoman.com, said one of the key social determinants of health is health literacy.

“The studies show that even having a health advocate with you when you obtain a surgery or are admitted into the hospital matters. It actually improves health outcomes,” McDonald said. “But if a person can’t even be their own health advocate, they’re really going to have more of a disparity when it comes to getting equal and appropriate care.”

In the COVID-19 intensive care unit at Northwestern Memorial Hospital in Chicago, every patient was extremely sick, but one woman in her 20s was in a class by herself. The infection, along with the severe inflammation and scarring that so often accompany it, had literally destroyed her lungs. She’d been put on a ventilator almost immediately, but after a few days even that wasn’t enough, and the ventilator was supplemented with an ECMO (extracorporeal membrane oxygenation) machine, essentially a mechanical lung.

“It’s (at) a level of concern that, if we didn’t change what we’re doing now, that we could be headed toward a Texas or Arizona sort of situation,” Jaline Gerardin, a Northwestern University assistant professor of preventive medicine who works on virus modeling, said in an interview Thursday.

Just prior to the onset of the coronavirus pandemic, the kidney pair donation program at Northwestern Memorial Hospital allowed four donors to be matched to four unknown recipients. Watch the eight donors and recipients meets for the first time via video call.

When the first coronavirus cases in Chicago appeared in January, they bore the same genetic signatures as a germ that emerged in China weeks before. But as Egon Ozer, an infectious-disease specialist at the Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine, examined the genetic structure of virus samples from local patients, he noticed something different.

Reminders of the COVID crisis are everywhere: the ubiquitous masks, social distancing rules and shortages of flour and toilet paper. Yet out of plain sight are the doctors, nurses, EMTs, home health care providers and janitors on the front lines. They work long hours and put their own health on the line to help others. They’re away from their families for extended periods and when they do arrive home, they self-isolate and refrain from hugging their spouses and children.