Laboratory findings in COVID-19 patients and biomarkers for early assessment of severity and mortality

The novel coronavirus-19 (severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus-2) pandemic has crossed more than 4,006,257 cases with 278,892 deaths worldwide and 67,152 cases and 2206 deaths in India. The disease has a variable clinical course ranging from mild to severe disease. Although most of the patients are asymptomatic, some patients with comorbidities have a high propensity of clinical worsening and mortality and it is this chunk of patients that we need to recuperate. Studies have shown that a number of laboratory parameters, which are easily available and inexpensive, can adequately predict the disease severity at an early stage. In a resource-limited country like India, where costly investigations cannot be routinely carried out in the magnitude as big as that of this pandemic, it is imperative that patients be monitored with these simple and inexpensive parameters that are elucidated in this review. We carried out an electronic search on PubMed and Google Scholar with keywords “laboratory abnormalities in COVID-19,” “coagulopathy in COVID-19,” “sepsis in COVID-19,” “hematologic abnormalities in COVID-19,” “kidney injury in COVID-19,” “acute respiratory distress syndrome in COVID-19,” “cardiac injury in COVID-19,” “liver injury in COVID-19,” and “severity indicators in COVID-19” till present date (May 11, 2020). All studies that appeared in our search results were scrutinized and 40 studies were selected for the study.