TNF and COVID-19: Conversely, in a study by Gao et al. (2020) [89], fT3 was negatively associated with CRP and IL-6 only in non-severely ill patients and survivors, and with tumor necrosis factor alpha (TNF-α) only in survivors, while not related to CRP, IL-6 and TNF-α in non-survivors, possibly due to a different role of the inflammatory response in NTIS at different stages of COVID-19.