Morphological alterations in peripheral blood smears of covid 19 patients

Abstract

Corona virus disease 2019 (COVID-19) caused by Novel Corona Virus (2019-nCOV), is attracting the attention of the whole world from December 2019 with wide range of clinical manifestations extending from a mild flu-like illness to life-threatening forms (1). Globally, till 11th June 2021, there have been 174,502,686 confirmed cases of COVID-19, including 3,770,361 deaths, reported to WHO. Universal implementation of corona etiquettes, vaccination, extensive diagnosis of COVID 19 by RTPCR and enhancement of prognostic and therapeutic facilities decreases the new cases over 3 million and over 73 000 new deaths (2). Despite differences among countries, the overall in-hospital mortality is high, being reported up to 30% [3].The reasons underlying such a different clinical behavior are still unknown; thus, it is difficult to predict who will develop a severe clinical picture and who, conversely, will show a mild disease. Blood cell count is a simple, highly informative, and universally available laboratory test. Furthermore, preliminary reports suggest that blood cell count is valuable tool for clinical risk stratification [4 -6].