A simple laboratory parameter facilitates early identification of COVID-19 patients

Abstract

The total number of COVID-19 patients since the outbreak of this infection in Wuhan, China has reached 40000 and are still growing. To facilitate triage or identification of the large number of COVID-19 patients from other patients with similar symptoms in designated fever clinics, we set to identify a practical marker that could be conveniently utilized by first-line health-care workers in clinics. To do so, we performed a case-control study by analyzing clinical and laboratory findings between PCR-confirmed SARS-CoV-2 positive patients (n=52) and SARS-CoV-2 negative patients (n=53). The patients in two cohorts all had similar symptoms, mainly fever and respiratory symptoms. The rates of patients with leukocyte counts (normal or decreased number) or lymphopenia (two parameters suggested by current National and WHO COVID-19 guidelines) had no differences between these two cohorts, while the rate of eosinopenia (decreased number of eosinophils) in SARS-CoV-2 positive patients (79%) was much higher than that in SARS-CoV-2 negative patients (36%). When the symptoms were combined with eosinopenia, this combination led to a diagnosis sensitivity and specificity of 79% and 64%, respectively, much higher than 48% and 53% when symptoms were combined with leukocyte counts (normal or decreased number) and/ or lymphopenia. Thus, our analysis reveals that eosinopenia may be a potentially more reliable laboratory predictor for SARS-CoV-2 infection than leukocyte counts and lymphopenia recommended by the current guidelines.

Viral and atypical respiratory co‐infections in COVID‐19: a systematic review and meta‐analysis

“…Initial database searches resulted in 1766 publications of potential relevance with 1000 identified via Google Scholar, 316 publications identified via Medline/PubMed, 324 publications identified via EMBASE, 89 publications identified via Web of Science, 34 publications identified via Wiley's Cochrane Library, and 3 publications identified via OpenGrey (Figure 1; Supporting Information Table S2) At the full article screening stage, 6 study authors were contacted by mail regarding possible unpublished data from their studies with 1 responding that the data were unavailable. After title/abstract review and full text article screening, 19 articles were included in the final meta‐analysis with a total of 1880 patients 27–45 (Figure 2 and Table 1). Eleven included studies were from peer reviewed journals 28,29,31,34–38,40,41,45 .…”

“…Eleven included studies were from peer reviewed journals 28,29,31,34–38,40,41,45 . Eight studies comprised articles located on a British Medical Journal's preprint server for health sciences (medRxiv) containing articles that had not yet been peer reviewed 27,30,32,33,39,42,43,44 …”

“…Our meta‐analysis included 8 unpublished, non‐peer‐reviewed studies 27,30,32,33,39,42,43,44 . Prior studies found that most investigators and editors who evaluate meta‐analyses believe that unpublished data should be included as long as the information undergoes the same methodological evaluation as published studies 50–52 .…”

Chinese Public Attention to COVID-19 Epidemic: Based on Social Media

“…To fight against COVID-19 and promote the prevention and control of the epidemic, researchers have recently made efforts in various aspects; their research involves epidemiological research 5,6,7 , diagnostic methods of the novel coronavirus 8,9,10,11 , clinical characteristics of the disease 12,13,14,15,16 , characteristics of disease transmission 17,18,19 , development of candidate therapies 20,21,22 , the identification of animal hosts 23,24,25,26 , etc. However, there has been no research conducted on the public's attention to COVID-19.…”

Accuracy of routine biomarkers and blood leucocytes count to assist diagnosis of COVID-19-associated pneumonia in adult patients visiting the emergency department

“…Indeed, we reported the good predictive values of brinogen measurements. Fibrinogen is associated with worse prognosis of COVID patients, as described for D-dimers test [23]. Activation of coagulation and major risk of venous thromboembolism are described in COVID patients, in relation with the so-called cytokines storm [24].…”