Clinical evaluation of 41 COVID-19 patients (Non-ICU: 28 and ICU: 13) for over 26 chemokines and cytokines revealed increased levels of 16 of them such as IL-1β, IL-1RA, IL-17, IL-8, IL-9, IL-10, basic FGF, G-CSF, GM-CSF, IFN-γ, CXCL10, CCL2, CCL3, CCL4, PDGF, TNF-α. In comparison to non-ICU cases, patients admitted to ICU exhibited increased levels of IL1-β, IFN-γ, and IL-6, suggesting TH1 immune cell response as reported previously for SARS-CoV (Huang C. et al., 2020). Further, higher levels of G-CSF, CXCL10, CCL2, CCL3, and TNF-α indicated activation of monocytes and macrophages and damage to lung epithelial cells that were strongly correlated with ICU cases. The strength of this study is that this is the first comprehensive cytokine profiling study of the COVID-19 patients, where disease severity was compared with the cytokine response. The major limitation with this study is the small sample size for comparison between groups, and the use of lower respiratory specimen for testing rather nasopharyngeal swab sample – which is a sensitive specimen and commonly used for COVID-19 testing.