key: cord-0801680-l4jie8g6
authors: Andreozzi, Fabio; Hermans, Cedric; Yombi, Jean Cyr
title: Eosinopenia and COVID-19 patients: So specific ?
date: 2020-06-27
journal: EClinicalMedicine
DOI: 10.1016/j.eclinm.2020.100439
sha: ef11430e3e24e241ac4fa7d43e692e9337714472
doc_id: 801680
cord_uid: l4jie8g6

nan

To The Editor-During the COVID-19 pandemic, eosinopenia was described by Li et al. as a hallmark of this infection in patients presenting with fever [1] . For the prediction of positive SARS-CoV-2 cases (diagnosis based on RT-PCR), eosinopenia has a sensitivity of 74.7% and specificity of 68.7% with the area under the curve AUC of 0.717. The combination of eosinopenia and raised hs-CRP yielded a sensitivity of 67¢9% and specificity of 78¢2% (AUC = 0¢730).

Up until end of March 20, Seasonal Influenza and COVID-19 were simultaneously present in Europe. These two infections share similar clinical and biological features and co-infections can exist [2] . We reviewed the laboratory results of two cohorts of SARS-CoV-2 (N = 50) and Influenza A (N = 41) patients (diagnosis confirmed by RT PCR). On admission, 69 patients (76% of both groups) had a total eosinophil count lower than 50/ml and 44 patients (48% of both groups) had an undetectable eosinophil count (see Table 1 ). Upon closer examination, in the COVID-19 group, there were more reported cases of complete eosinopenia. Moderately low basophils and monocytes count were also a common finding.

As such from the above, we can reach to the conclusion that complete eosinopenia is a common finding in both COVID-19 and Seasonal Influenza infections. Thus result could imply that eosinopenia could be considered as a potential biological indicator of either Influenza or SARS-COV-2 infections. This could be very useful when both 

Eosinopenia and elevated C-reactive protein facilitate triage of COVID-19 patients in fever clinic: a retrospective casecontrol study

Co-infection with SARS-CoV-2 and influenza a virus in patient with pneumonia