ABSTRACT
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.