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Respiratory immune characteristics associated withCoronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) severity are currently unclear. We characterized bronchoalveolar lavage fluid immune cells from patients with varying severity of COVID-19 and from healthy people by using single-cell RNA sequencing. Proinflammatory monocyte-derived macrophages were abundant in the bronchoalveolar lavage fluid from patients with severe COVID-9. Moderate cases were characterized by the presence of highly clonally expanded CD8 + T cells. This atlas of the bronchoalveolar immune microenvironment suggests potential mechanisms underlying pathogenesis and recovery in COVID-19.

For aligning DNA sequences that differ only by sequencing errors, or by equivalent errors from other sources, a greedy algorithm can be much faster than traditional dynamic programming approaches and yet produce an alignment that is guaranteed to be theoretically optimal. We introduce a new greedy alignment algorithm with particularly good performance and show that it computes the same alignment as does a certain dynamic programming algorithm, while executing over 10 times faster on appropriate data. An implementation of this algorithm is currently used in a program that assembles the UniGene database at the National Center for Biotechnology Information.

Key PointsQuestionCould administration of convalescent plasma transfusion be beneficial in the treatment of critically ill patients with coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19)?FindingsIn this uncontrolled case series of 5 critically ill patients with COVID-19 and acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS), administration of convalescent plasma containing neutralizing antibody was followed by an improvement in clinical status.MeaningThese preliminary findings raise the possibility that convalescent plasma transfusion may be helpful in the treatment of critically ill patients with COVID-19 and ARDS, but this approach requires evaluation in randomized clinical trials.