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Abstract Since December 2019, several Wuhan city hospitals (Hubei Province, China) had detected unidentified pneumonia when it was recognized as a novel coronavirus (nCoV). The virus soon spread to other countries and regions within two months (Singhal 2020) . The outbreak has already spread to 220 countries worldwide, infecting more than 180 million individuals and triggering more than 3.9 million fatalities (WHO 2021) . Egypt announced the detection of the first case of corona virus disease 2019 (COVID-19) on the 14 th of February 2020 (WHO 2020) . CoV is a wide family of viruses that cause diseases ranging from mild colds to more severe diseases, such as Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS) and Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS). On 11 th February 2020, the International Committee for Virus Taxonomy released a statement confirming the formal name for the novel virus: " SARS-CoV2" (Lescure et al., 2020) . The diagnosis relies on estimating the likelihood of contact with an infected patient, the clinical signs & symptoms and detecting the viral ribonucleic acid (RNA) by polymerase chain reaction (PCR) in respiratory samples (Singhal 2020) . The full clinical presentation of COVID-19 is still not understood, but among the most common presentations are; cough, fever, dyspnea, anosmia and pneumonia. Currently, there is no effective antiviral therapy for treating SARS-CoV2 infection (Raman et al., 2021) . So, early identification of the severity of the disease is very important to enable intervention to reduce the mortality risk and predict prognosis (Xu et al., 2020b) . 21 The inflammatory cytokine storm has been recognized as the primary cause of death in patients with COVID-19 (Chen et al., 2020a) , which is defined by the excessive and uncontrolled release of pro-inflammatory cytokines (PICs), as has been reported in other infections caused by pathogenic CoVs (Qin et al., 2020) . For instance, inflammatory cytokines released by macrophages (interleukin 6 (IL-6), interleukin10 (IL-10) and tumor necrosis factor α (TNF-α)) increase in patients with severe COVID-19 disease, resulting in damage to the lungs and other organs (Chen et al., 2020a) . Consequently, measurements of plasma inflammatory markers such as Ferritin, Lactate dehydrogenase (LDH) and C-reactive protein (CRP) may predict the disease's seriousness (Zhao et al., 2020a) . 22 Aim of the Work Collection and analysis of the hematological characteristics of COVID- 19 patients admitted to Fayoum University Hospital (FUH) between April and July 2020. |