Persistent SARS-CoV-2 presence is companied with defects in adaptive immune system in non-severe COVID-19 patients

Bing Liu; Junyan Han; Xiaohuan Cheng; Long Yu; Li Zhang; Wei Wang; Lan Ni; Chaojie Wei; Yafei Huang; Zhenshun Cheng

The copyright holder for this preprint (which was not peer-reviewed) is the . https://doi.org/10.1101/2020.03. 26.20044768 doi: medRxiv preprint [16] . However, changes in adaptive immune cells in non-severe COVID-19 patients with persistent SARS-CoV-2 shedding has yet to be examined. For this purpose, peripheral blood samples from patients in the PA and PP group were collected, the absolute numbers and relative frequencies of each lymphocyte subpopulations were compared between these two groups. In addition, 54 age-and sex-matched healthy subjects were randomly selected as healthy control (the HC group). As shown in Table 3 , we failed to find any differences between the PP group and the HC group, but patients from both groups had increased numbers of CD3 + T cells, CD4 + T cells, and NK cells compared to those from the PA group. In addition, PA patients had significantly lower frequency of B cells compared with healthy subjects (Table 3 ). These results indicated that non-severe COVID-19 patients (PA group) have already dysregulated immune system at diasese onset, and those with persistent SARS-CoV-2 shedding could restore this abnormality to some level.