Abstract

COVID-19 is an aggressive virus spread worldwide and caused pandemic infection and there is an urgent need to identify a predictor whether clinical or laboratory. Now the challenged against coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19), not only to the diagnosed virus but to predict the progression towards severe and fatal forms, these predictors will enable risk stratification, guide interventional studies to target patients at enhanced risk of developing severe disease and optimize the allocation of limited human and technical resources in the ongoing pandemic. Moreover, identification of laboratory parameters capable of discriminating between severe and non-severe cases, or those at high or low risk of mortality, will allow for improved clinical situational awareness. The present study sheds the light on the role of three hematological markers (hemoglobin, weight blood cell & platelets) each one of them has a role in the development of signs and symptoms. So, this longitudinal study is designed to investigate the effect of three hematological markers on the prognosis of the disease .Blood samples were collected from 296 newly diagnosed patients with COVID19 at Al-Hakeem of a local hospital in Najaf-Iraq from March 1th to April 23rd, 2020. The results show, the mean of three hematological markers significantly increased with a mild sign (P =0.005, 0.002&0.005) for hemoglobin, WBC &platelets respectively. Moreover, by using the Kaplan-Mier test the mortality rate of COVID-19 patients increased with low levels of three hematological marker concentration during a maximum of 4weeks of follow up periods post-diagnosis. By using a ROC curve the three hematological markers shows a good test to predict patients with severe cases. From these findings, we can conclude that high expression of platelets, hemoglobin, and WBC (weight blood cell) correlates with the surviving rate and may be used as the prognostic marker.

Key words: Hematological changes, Corona virus -19