Background: The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) is an emerging pandemic of global public health concern. We aimed to summarize the characteristics of COVID-19 patients in the early stage of the pandemic and explore the risk factors of disease progression.Methods: We conducted a systematic review with meta-analysis, searching three databases for studies published between January 1, 2020, and March 18, 2020. We used random-effects models to calculate the 95% confidence intervals of pooled estimated prevalence and the odds ratio between the severe and nonsevere cases.Results: Ninety studies involving 16,526 COVID-19 patients were included. Hypertension (19.1%) and diabetes (9.5%) were the most common comorbidities. The most prevalent clinical symptoms were fever (78.4%), cough (58.5%), and fatigue (26.4%). Increased serum ferritin (74.2%), high C-reactive protein (73.3%), and high erythrocyte sedimentation rate (ESR) (72.2%) were the most frequently reported laboratory abnormalities. Most patients had bilateral lung involvement (82.2%) and showed peripheral (66.9%) and subpleural (62.1%) distribution, with multifocal involvement (73.1%). And the most common CT features were vascular enlargement (64.3%), ground-glass opacity (GGO) (60.7%), and thickened interlobular septa (55.1%). Respiratory failure was the most common complication (30.7%) and the overall case-fatality rate (CFR) was 4.2%. Moreover, male, history of smoking, and comorbidities might influence the prognosis. Most clinical symptoms such as fever, high fever, cough, sputum production, fatigue, shortness of breath, dyspnoea, and abdominal pain were linked to the severity of disease. Some specific laboratory indicators implied the deterioration of disease, such as leucocytosis, lymphopenia, platelet, alanine aminotransferase (ALT), aspartate aminotransferase (AST), albumin, creatinine, creatine kinase (CK), lactic dehydrogenase (LDH), C-reactive protein, procalcitonin (PCT), and D-dimer. Besides, the risk of bilateral pneumonia, consolidation, pleural effusion, and enlarged mediastinal nodes was higher in severe cases.Conclusions: Most COVID-19 patients have fever and cough with lymphopenia and increased inflammatory indices, and the main CT feature is GGO involved bilateral lung. Patients with comorbidities and worse clinical symptoms, laboratory characteristics, and CT findings tend to have poor disease progression. respectively. According to the prior studies, the SARS-CoV-2, a betacoronavirus, is both similar and different to the SARS-CoV and MERS-CoV (3). As reported, the mortality of SARS-CoV and MERS-CoV is higher than that of SARS-CoV-2. But the pandemic caused by COVID-19 has exceeded the previous two diseases (4).It is important to find out the epidemiological, clinical, laboratory and image features of patients with SARS-CoV-2 infection and risk factors of severe illness for better prevention and treatment of this disease. Large quantities of researches have made effort to understand this subject, but most were case series, cross-sectional ...

The immune system initiates robust immune responses to defend against invading pathogens or tumor cells and protect the body from damage, thus acting as a fortress of the body. However, excessive responses cause detrimental effects, such as inflammation and autoimmune diseases. To balance the immune responses and maintain immune homeostasis, there are immune checkpoints to terminate overwhelmed immune responses. Pathogens and tumor cells can also exploit immune checkpoint pathways to suppress immune responses, thus escaping immune surveillance. As a consequence, therapeutic antibodies that target immune checkpoints have made great breakthroughs, in particular for cancer treatment. While the overall efficacy of immune checkpoint blockade (ICB) is unsatisfactory since only a small group of patients benefited from ICB treatment. Hence, there is a strong need to search for other targets that improve the efficacy of ICB. Ubiquitination is a highly conserved process which participates in numerous biological activities, including innate and adaptive immunity. A growing body of evidence emphasizes the importance of ubiquitination and its reverse process, deubiquitination, on the regulation of immune responses, providing the rational of simultaneous targeting of immune checkpoints and ubiquitination/deubiquitination pathways to enhance the therapeutic efficacy. Our review will summarize the latest findings of ubiquitination/deubiquitination pathways for anti-tumor immunity, and discuss therapeutic significance of targeting ubiquitination/deubiquitination pathways in the future of immunotherapy.