Clinical Characteristics of Two Human to Human Transmitted Coronaviruses: Corona Virus Disease 2019 versus Middle East Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus.

Ping Xu; Guo-Dong Sun; Zhi-Zhong Li

is the (which was not peer-reviewed) The copyright holder for this preprint . https://doi.org/10.1101/2020.03.08.20032821 doi: medRxiv preprint 1 1 In terms of laboratory testing, reduced lymphocytes and increased CRP were found in both COVID-19 and MERS-COV patients. This result indicates that COVID-19 might be associated with cellular immune response, mainly act on lymphocytes like MERS-COV does [48] . The cells infected by viruses induce the release of numbers of pro-inflammatory cytokines and inflammation storm in the body. Moreover, increased cytokines might make damage to related organs such as liver [49] . Our results demonstrated that abnormal value of AST was found in MERS-COV population, but not in COVID-19 population. The possible reason is that the follow-up time of COVID-19 population was too short, and the liver might remain to be in compensatory stage. For this result, a long follow-up time study is urgently needed. On the other hand, our results suggested that MERS-COV population had a higher rate of ICU admission and fatality than COVID-19 population, indicating that compared with MERS-COV, COVID-19 has less toxic and more easily cured. However, lower discharge rate was found in COVID population than in MERS-COV population. The possible explanation is that most of COVID-19 patients remained to be hospitalized at the time of manuscript submission, and data on those patients could not be obtained in time. Thus, careful interpretation is urged for this result.