Longitudinal characteristics of lymphocyte responses and cytokine profiles in the peripheral blood of SARS-CoV-2 infected patients

Jing Liu; Sumeng Li; Jia Liu; Boyun Liang; Xiaobei Wang; Hua Wang; Wei Li; Qiaoxia Tong; Jianhua Yi; Lei Zhao; Lijuan Xiong; Chunxia Guo; Jin Tian; Jinzhuo Luo; Jinghong Yao; Ran Pang; Hui Shen; Cheng Peng; Ting Liu; Qian Zhang; Jun Wu; Ling Xu; Sihong Lu; Baoju Wang; Zhihong Weng; Chunrong Han; Huabing Zhu; Ruxia Zhou; Helong Zhou; Xiliu Chen; Pian Ye; Bin Zhu; Shengsong He; Yongwen He; Shenghua Jie; Ping Wei; Jianao Zhang; Yinping Lu; Weixian Wang; Li Zhang; Ling Li; Fengqin Zhou; Jun Wang; Ulf Dittmer; Mengji Lu; Yu Hu; Dongliang Yang; Xin Zheng

In this study, we analyzed the clinical features and immunological characteristics of peripheral blood in patients with COVID-19. Although the majority of the patients did not have an exposure history of the Huanan seafood market in Wuhan, the clinical characteristics of these patients are very similar to those reported in previous studies [2, 4, 7] . The ages of severe patients are older, and the proportion of underlying diseases is higher, and co-infection also occurs in severe patients. Recent reports show that the lymphocyte counts are normal in COVID-19 patients with mild diseases. In contrast, 63%-70.3% of patients with severe diseases have lymphopenia and the lymphocyte counts in patients with a mortal outcome remain at a low level [4, 8] . Our study also confirmed higher rates of developing lymphopenia in severe patients than in mild patients (84.6% vs 44.4%). We found that the development of lymphopenia in severe patients was mainly related to the significantly decreased absolute counts of T cells, especially CD8 + T cells, but not to B cells and NK cells. The decrease of T cells in the severe patient group reaches its peak within the first week during the disease course, and then T cell numbers gradually increase from the second week and recover to a comparable level to that of the mild patient group in the third week. All these severe patients included in our study survived the disease, and thus we speculate this course is associated with a favorable outcome in severe COVID-19 patients. author/funder, who has granted medRxiv a license to display the preprint in perpetuity.