Detectable serum SARS-CoV-2 viral load (RNAaemia) is closely associated with drastically elevated interleukin 6 (IL-6) level in critically ill COVID-19 patients

Xiaohua Chen; Binghong Zhao; Yueming Qu; Yurou Chen; Jie Xiong; Yong Feng; Dong Men; Qianchuan Huang; Ying Liu; Bo Yang; Jinya Ding; Feng Li

The copyright holder for this preprint (which was not peer-reviewed) is . https://doi.org/10.1101/2020.02.29.20029520 doi: medRxiv preprint phenomenon. Our data strongly suggest that both RNAaemia and high IL-6 level were exclusively observed in critically ill patients, which prompt us to further study the relation between them. As shown in Figure 3A , patients with RNAaemia exhibited much higher IL-6 level compared with other patients. We then checked the IL-6 value in each of the RNAaemia patients, strikingly, all of their IL-6 value were more than 100 (Table S1 ). In order to further confirm the relation between them, we firstly analyze the IL-6 value in the critically ill patients, notably, the mortality appeared to be correlated with IL-6 value ≥100 because all of the death in this study were belong to this group (Table S1), we therefore define IL-6 value ≥100 as high and the rest of cases as low, the IL-6 high patients accounted for 35.3% in critically ill group ( Figure 3B ). As shown in Table 3 , the incidence of RNAaemia was closely correlated with IL-6 high in critically ill patients (R=0.902). These data clearly suggested that RNAaemia was related with poor prognosis, indeed, all the RNAaemia patients were at higher risk of multiple organs impairment compared to those patients without RNAaemia (Figure 4A-C) .