Using high quality NDRS data, the team from the Registration of Complex Rare Diseases Exemplars in Rheumatology (RECORDER) project recently published the pre-print of a new study.
The study found that between March and July 2020, during the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic in England, people with rare autoimmune rheumatic disease were more likely to:
- be infected by COVID-19 (1.5x)
- die as a result of COVID-19 (2.4x)
This is compared to the general population.
The results highlight the urgent need to understand the real-world effectiveness of vaccination among people with rare autoimmune rheumatic diseases, as there are concerns that they may respond less well to vaccination than the general population.