Morphological changes of lymphocytes in peripheral blood smears of patients with COVID-19

Abstract

Clinical laboratory has played an important role in the diagnosis, treatment and prognosis of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) patients. A notable laboratory finding was that the absolute value of lymphocyte in most confirmed cases was reduced, which suggests that severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) might mainly act on lymphocytes (1). Previous published studies mainly focused on epidemiological, radiological, and clinical characteristics of COVID-19 patients. Little attention has been paid to the morphological changes of peripheral white blood cell. Hence, this pilot study was to investigate whether SARS-CoV-2 infection causes morphological changes in peripheral lymphocytes.