Figure 5.

Cytokine response module and gene expression in COVID-19 blood samples

(A) Geometric mean expression of IL-1β and IL-6 response module and IL1A, IL1B, and IL6 gene expression in patients admitted with COVID-19 (Ong et al., 2020). Number of patient samples at each time point designated on first plot of each row but applicable for all panels. Where more than one sample was available at any time point, the mean expression +/− SEM is plotted. Kruskal-Wallis test was performed on binned time points 4–6, 7–9, 10–12, and 12 + days following hospitalization, corresponding to 4, 7, 8, and 3 samples in each of these categories. The p values shown represent Kruskal-Wallis tests with time since hospital admission as the independent variable, where a threshold of 0.01 (corrected for multiple testing by the Bonferroni method) is required for a single test to be classed as significant (significant p values indicated in bold text).

(B) Geometric mean expression of IL-1β and IL-6 response modules in whole blood transcriptomic profiles from patients admitted with moderate (n = 11), severe (n = 10), or critical (n = 11) COVID-19, in comparison to healthy controls (n = 13) (Hadjadj et al., 2020). In this study, samples were collected from patients at the time of admission to hospital, a median of 10 days (IQR 9–11 days) from symptom onset. A Mann-Whitney test was used to assess differences in module expression between all COVID-19 patients and healthy controls (p value on figure), and a Kruskal-Wallis test was used to determine variability in module expression between the grades of COVID-19 disease severity.