Traces of SARS-CoV-2 RNA in the Blood of COVID-19 Patients

Moustafa, A.; Aziz, R. K.

The severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) is the third virus that caused coronavirus-related outbreaks over the past 20 years. The outbreak was first reported in December 2019 from Wuhan, China, but rapidly progressed into a pandemic of an unprecedented scale since the 1918 flu pandemic. In addition to respiratory complications in COVID-19 patients, clinical characterizations of severe infection cases indicated a number of other comorbidities, including multiple organ failure (liver, kidney, and heart) and septic shock. In an attempt to elucidate COVID-19 pathogenesis in different human organs, we interrogated the presence of the virus in the blood, or any of its components, which might provide a form of trafficking or hiding to the virus. By computationally analyzing high-throughput sequence data from patients with active COVID-19 infection, we found evidence of traces of SARS-CoV-2 RNA in peripheral blood mononuclear cells (PBMC), while the virus RNA was abundant in bronchoalveolar lavage specimens from the same patients. To the best of our knowledge, the presence of SAR-CoV-2 RNA in the PBMC of COVID-19 patients has not been reported before, and this observation could suggest immune presentation, but discounts the possibility of extensive viral infection of lymphocytes or monocytes.