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We read with great interest the letter by Mathian et al in the Annals of the Rheumatic Diseases. In the letter, the authors reported that hydroxychloroquine (HCQ) did not protect patients with systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE) from severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) infection in the clinical treatment. We report similar results from our study of treatment of patients with SLE on HCQ. We wish to add supplemental evidence to some of the points not adequately addressed in Mathian et al’s1 letter.
Mathian et al did not report the incidence rate of COVID-19 in patients with SLE. We agree with Mathian et al. that it is not practical to assess the actual incidence rate of SARS-CoV-2 in patients with SLE. However, we observed that during the outbreak, 6 (0.2%) cases had SLE in 3057 patients with COVID-19 who were admitted to Wuhan Huoshenshan Hospital (China). Taking that the prevalence of SLE is approximately 0.05%–0.1% in China, this may suggest that patients with SLE are susceptible to SARS-CoV-2 infection.2 3 As HCQ is the first-line drug that will be prescribed to patients with SLE, our result confirmed the …
Footnotes
CL, ZW and JL contributed equally.
Contributors CL, JL, ZW and XX contributed to the acquisition and analysis of data. QW and YL were involved in the interpretation of data. All authors contributed to drafting and/or revising the manuscript.
Funding Supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (grant nos 81572893, 81972358, 81959113), Key Foundation of Wuhan Huoshenshan Hospital (grant no 2020[18]), Key Research and Development Program of Jiangsu Province (grant nos BE2017733, BE2018713), Medical Innovation Project of Logistics Service (grant no 18JS005), Science and Technology Development Fund of Nanjing Medical University (grant no NMUB2019031), and Basic Research Program of Jiangsu Province (grant no BK20180036).
Competing interests None declared.
Patient and public involvement Patients and/or the public were not involved in the design, or conduct, or reporting, or dissemination plans of this research.
Provenance and peer review Not commissioned; internally peer reviewed.
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