Figure 1.

Immune cell profiling of PBMCs from healthy controls, mild and severe COVID-19 patients and severe COVID-19 patients treated with dexamethasone. (A) Principal components analysis (PCA) of NanoString transcriptomic data. (B) Heatmap depicting immune cell abundance in PBMCs from healthy donors (n=5) and mild COVID-19 patients (n=4). Significantly altered cell types are highlighted in gray and represented by *. (C) Heatmap depicting abundance of immune cell types in PBMCs from patients with mild (n=4), severe COVID-19 (Severe, n=3), and severe COVID-19 + dexamethasone (Dexa, n=4). Significantly altered cell types between mild and severe are highlighted in gray, and those altered between severe +/- dexamethasone are marked by red arrows. (D) Cell types significantly altered by dexamethasone treatment in severe COVID-19 patients. Bars represent means ± SD. In (A, D), each symbol represents an individual patient or healthy donor. Dexa = dexamethasone. Significance was determined by unpaired t-test and by Mann-Whitney rank sum test where samples failed normality. The abundance of the different immune cell types (at the RNA level) in the various patient cohorts was calculated as log₂ cell type scores. The cell scores for a specific cell type can only be compared between two groups (such as mild vs. severe COVID-19) but do not support claims that a cell type is more abundant than another cell type within the same group.