It remains unclear why the lymphopenia is T cell-biased and perhaps specifically CD8+ T cell-biased, the presence of SARS-CoV-2 specific CD4+ and CD8+ T cells have been associated with milder disease (Rovito et al., 2022), consistent with the observation that patients with moderate disease displayed a T cell count similar to that of healthy controls. Here, CD4 is linked to lymphopenia.