Early Plasma Interferon-ß Levels as a Predictive Marker of COVID-19 Severe Clinical Events in Adult Patients.

We assessed relationships between early peripheral blood type I Interferons levels, clinical new early warning scores (NEWS) and clinical outcomes in hospitalized COVID-19 adult patients. Early IFN-ß levels were lower among patients who further required intensive care unit (ICU) admission than those measured in patients who did not require an ICU admission during SARS-CoV-2 infection. IFN-ß levels were inversely correlated with NEWS only in the subgroup of patients who further required ICU admission. To assess whether peripheral blood IFN-ß levels could be a potential relevant biomarker to predict further need for ICU admission, we performed Receiver Operating Characteristic (ROC) curve analyses that showed for all study patients an area under ROC curve of 0.77 growing to 0.86 (P= 0.003) when the analysis was restricted to a subset of patients with NEWS ≥ 5 at the time of hospital admission. Overall, our findings indicated that early peripheral blood IFN-ß levels might be a relevant predictive marker of further need for an intensive care unit admission in hospitalized COVID-19 adult patients, specifically when clinical score (NEWS) was graded as upper than 5 at the time of hospital admission. This article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved.

Asymptomatic COVID-19 Adult Outpatients identified as Significant Viable SARS-CoV-2 Shedders (preprint)

Differential kinetics of RNA loads and infectious viral levels in the upper respiratory tract between asymptomatic and symptomatic SARS-CoV-2 infected adult outpatients remain unclear limiting recommendations that may guide clinical management, infection control measures and occupational health decisions. In the present investigation, 496 (2.5%) of 17,911 French adult outpatients were positive for an upper respiratory tract SARS-CoV-2 RNA detection by a quantitative RT-PCR assay, of which 180 (36.3%) were COVID-19 asymptomatic. Of these adult asymptomatic viral shedders, 84.4% had mean to high RNA viral loads (Ct values<30) which median value was significantly higher than that observed in symptomatic subjects (P=0.029), and 50.6% were positive by cell culture assays of their upper respiratory tract specimens. Our findings indicate that COVID-19 asymptomatic adult outpatients are significant viable SARS-CoV-2 shedders in their upper respiratory tract playing a major potential role as SARS-CoV-2 transmitters in various epidemiological transmission chains, promoting COVID-19 resurgence in populations.