Specificities of COVID-19 disease course in patients with haematologic malignancies are still poorly studied. So, we aimed to compare patients with haematologic malignancies to patients without malignancies, matched by sex and age and hospitalised for COVID-19 at the same time and in the same centre. Among 25 patients with haematologic malignancies, we found that mortality (40% versus 4%,
p
< 0.01), number of days with RT-PCR positivity (21.2 ± 15.9 days [range, 3–57] versus 7.4 ± 5.6 days [range, 1–24],
p
< 0.01), maximal viral load (mean minimal Ct, 17.2 ± 5.2 [range, 10–30] versus 26.5 ± 5.1 [range, 15–33],
p
< 0.0001) and the delay between symptom onset and clinical worsening (mean time duration between symptom onset and first day of maximum requirement in inspired oxygen fraction, 14.3 ± 10.7 days versus 9.6 ± 3.7 days,
p
= 0.0485) were higher than in other patients. COVID-19 course in patients with haematologic malignancies has a delayed onset and is more severe with a higher mortality, and patients may be considered as super-spreaders. Clinicians and intensivists need to be trained to understand the specificity of COVID-19 courses in patients with haematological malignancies.
Supplementary Information
The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s00277-021-04656-z.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.