https://www.wired.com/story/doctors-are-pooling-data-to-help-understand-covid-19/

An anti-malaria medicine called hydroxychloroquine might be a rescue drug for Covid-19—or maybe not. Or another anti-inflammatory drug, such as tocilizumab, might dampen the deadliest effects of the coronavirus. For now, there’s a lot of hope—and a controversial plug from President Donald Trump—for existing medicines that could possibly work as Covid-19 treatments, but not much data. Fast-tracked studies will take weeks, if not months, to produce results. So in the meantime, doctors around the globe are responding by sharing information, creating registries of people with chronic diseases who have also become infected with Covid-19. Each entry is just an anecdote: the bare details of each patient's age, underlying conditions, the medicines they take regularly and for Covid-19, and how well they fare under treatment. But collectively, the registries offer a valuable picture of an evolving disease.

Gastroenterologists at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill and the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York were the first to organize a project to collect disease-specific Covid-19 data, with a focus on patients with inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) such as Crohn’s disease and colitis. After they launched the project on March 10, a global online community came together with uncanny speed. “Two and half weeks ago, we knew that the patients and caregivers and the professional community needed to have answers and needed to have them really quickly, so we could advise patients what to do as this pandemic continues to take hold,” says Michael Kappelman, a pediatric gastroenterologist at UNC and a cofounder of the SECURE-IBD.