Tech firms around the world are in an overdrive to help battle the coronavirus pandemic. Research showed that 6.5% of COVID-19 patients can suddenly progress to serious illness, and among them the mortality rate can be as high as 49%. Therefore one of the key tasks for health authorities is to identify and treat patients who may develop severe or fatal syndromes early on. That's what has been underway at a research team jointly established by Tencent AI Lab and a group of Chinese public health scientists headed by Zhong Nanshan, the country's senior medical advisor on COVID-19, since its inception in February. This week, the team unveiled a deep learning-based model that can predict the risk of coronavirus patients developing critical illness.