A new study of people in the New York City area who have been hospitalized with COVID-19 reveals that most of them have more than one underlying illness, some of which seem to increase their risk for bad outcomes. In the new study, published in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), researchers wanted to learn more about people who are hospitalized after contracting the novel coronavirus. They looked at electronic health records data from 5,700 people with COVID-19 who had been admitted to hospitals within the Northwell Health system—which currently has the largest number of COVID-19 cases in the country—in the New York City area in March and early April. The median age of patients was 63 years old, and 94% of them had at least one comorbidity, meaning that they had at least one other disease in addition to COVID-19. The most common were hypertension (affecting about 53% of all COVID-19 patients), obesity (affecting about 42% of patients with BMI data) and diabetes (affecting about 32% of all patients).