Currently, little is known about specific phenotypical and/or functional T cell changes associated with COVID-19. In the majority of preprints and peer-reviewed studies, there are reports of increased presence of activated T cells (Figure 3) characterized by expression of HLA-DR, CD38, CD69, CD25, CD44, and Ki-67 (Braun et al., 2020, Ni et al., 2020, Guo et al., 2020, Liao et al., 2020, Thevarajan et al., 2020, Yang et al., 2020a, Zheng et al., 2020a). Generally, independent of COVID-19 disease severity, CD8 T cells seem to be more activated than CD4 T cells (Qin et al., 2020, Thevarajan et al., 2020, Yang et al., 2020a), a finding that echoes stronger CD8 than CD4 T cell responses during SARS-CoV-1 (Li et al., 2008). Furthermore, in a case study of 10 COVID-19 patients, Diao et al. showed that levels of PD-1 increased from prodromal to symptomatic stages of the disease (Diao et al., 2020). PD-1 expression is commonly associated with T cell exhaustion, but it is important to emphasize that PD-1 is primarily induced by TCR signaling; it is thus also expressed by activated effector T cells (Ahn et al., 2018).