Severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2(SARS-CoV-2), which was initially identified in December 2019, has infected over 33 million individuals and killed over one million people globally. Rheumatic disorders are chronic inflammatory diseases with unknown frequency and effect in COVID-19 patients. For a study, researchers used a pooled analysis of available data to describe clinical presentation and patient outcomes in people with existing rheumatic illness with concomitant COVID-19. PubMed and Google Scholar were searched for research published between July 22, 2020, that reported data on patients with rheumatic illness who were diagnosed with SARS-CoV-2 infection. Random-effects models were used to estimate the pooled incidence and rates of hospitalization, intensive care unit admission, and death among the patients, and interstudy heterogeneity was discovered using I^2 statistics with a value of more than 75% indicating significant interstudy variance.
About 20 investigations were included, yielding a total of 49,099 SARS-CoV-2 positive patients. A total of 1,382 COVID-19 patients were previously diagnosed with a rheumatic illness, out of 49,099 COVID-19 patients. COVID-19 was discovered to be present in 0.9% of rheumatic illness patients in a random-effects pooled study. Hospitalization, critical care unit admission, and fatality rates were correspondingly 70.7%, 11.6%, and 10.2%.
Although the frequency of SARS-CoV-2 infection in patients with the rheumatic disease was not particularly high, concomitant COVID-19 appeared to have a role in defining disease severity and outcomes to some extent. More research was needed to determine whether this section of the population is at a higher risk of COVID-19 and related effects when compared to the general population.
