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. 2022 Mar 21;407(4):1315–1332. doi: 10.1007/s00423-022-02495-8

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© The Author(s) 2022

Open AccessThis article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.

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Fig. 2 — The different diseases phases of SARS-CoV-2 infection in relation to the severity of COVID-19. The initial phase is characterized by mild infection with cough and fever or even presents asymptomatically. Blood examinations might give evidence for lymphopenia and neutrophilia. The prognosis at this stage is very good. In case of progression of the infection, a transition to a pulmonary phase with clinical and morphological development of pneumonia can be found, which makes frequently hospitalization necessary. The prognosis depends on the severity of pulmonary function impairment or respiratory insufficiency and comorbidities of the affected patients. Transition to the 3rd phase results in the development of a systemic extrapulmonary syndrome with a systemic increase in proinflammatory markers. The prognosis is poor due to the development of sepsis with multiple organ failure and/or ARDS (modified from [96])