This is an interesting point. While knowledge of variants is of great importance from an epidemiologic point of view as they have different transmission rates and can cause diseases of different severity, the mechanism of the acute inflammatory response in severe infection seems to be similar regardless the strain. While we did not perform specific sequencing of the strain for every patient as this wouldn’t have been feasible, patients were included before the Delta variant emerged and we expect most of them to have had the initial D614G and UK B.1.1.7. Nonetheless, we have included a comment addressing this aspect in our limitations section to highlight this area of uncertainty.
Point 2: The proposed timing of Tocilizumab administration based on oxygen flow rate is interesting but undoubtedly requires a more detailed statistical analysis to convince the readers.