hematological parameters in covid-19 patients: association with severity of the disease

the novel coronavirus (covid-19) produced severe acute respiratory coronavirus syndrome (sars-cov-2; formerly known as 2019-ncov) and has mild to fatal symptoms. this study aimed to investigate the different blood markers in confirmed positive covid-19 individuals and see how they associated with the severity of the condition. a cross-sectional study was conducted from september 2020 to march 2021 on seventy-six (20 female and 56 male) iraqi patients unvaccinated against covid-19. the mean age of the study subjects was (47.00±13.31; 43.86±14.27) for males and females, respectively. 68.42% of the cases with mild illness, 14.47% with moderate illness, and 17.10% were severely ill. the severity of covid-19 was assessed by several hematological parameters, including white blood cell (wbc) count, derived indicators such as neutrophils to lymphocyte ratio (nlr) and il6, c-reactive protein (crp), d-dimer, and s-ferritin. the results showed that lymphocyte count was lower in severely ill patients compared to patients with mild and moderate symptoms, with a significant difference between the three groups (2.274.83). additionally, the nlr results showed a significant rise (11.56±1.23) in severe covid-19. the results of the present study indicated that serum levels of il6, crp, and s-ferritin revealed significant differences (41.20±6.23 pg/ml), (50.66±12.55 mg/l), and (454.60±95.69 ng/ml) at (p≤0.05) in sever ill compared with mild and moderately ill patients respectively. the results indicated a highly significant positive correlation between il6 and severity of covid-19 infection at p 0.01. furthermore, a positive connection is seen in neutrophil, crp, and nlr (0.229, 0.264, and 0.277) at (p≤0.05) respectively.