Autoimmune diseases are independently associated with COVID-19 severity: Evidence based on adjusted effect estimatesThere have been several published articles reporting the association between autoimmune diseases and the risk of severity among patients with coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19). But the conclusions across studies are inconsistent. [1][2][3][4][5][6] Recently, Liu et al. performed a meta-analysis based on six studies with 2091 cases published in Journal of Infection to investigate the association between autoimmune diseases and severe or dead Their results demonstrated that autoimmune diseases were not significantly associated with severe or dead COVID-19 (odds ratio (OR) = 1.21, 95% confidence interval (CI): 0.58-2.50 for severity and OR = 1.31, 95% CI: 0.33-5.20 for mortality). 7 This is an extremely interesting paper. However, the number of included studies and sample sizes are limited. Up to now, several papers with large sample sizes on this topic are emerging. Therefore, it is required to clarify the association between autoimmune diseases and COVID-19 severity based on updated data.To our knowledge, several factors such as age, gender and underlying disorders (hypertension, diabetes, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, cerebrovascular disease, cardiovascular disease, chronic kidney disease and obesity, etc.) significantly affected the clinical outcomes of COVID-19. This suggests that these risk factors might modulate the association of autoimmune diseases with COVID-19 severity. To obtain a precise conclusion, this metaanalysis was carried out based on published studies reporting adjusted effect estimates, rather than those reporting un-adjusted effect estimates.This meta-analysis was performed in accordance with the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-analyses (PRISMA) statement. International databases of PubMed, Web of Science and EMBASE were searched to identify potential studies up to December 12, 2020. The following keywords were used: "coronavirus disease 2019 , "COVID-19 , "SARS-CoV-2 , "autoimmune diseases", "rheumatic diseases", "inflammatory bowel disease", "psoriasis" and "systemic lupus erythematosus". Only peerreviewed articles published in English reporting adjusted effect estimates on the association between autoimmune diseases and COVID-19 severity (severe, critical and mortal outcomes) were eligibly included. Repeated articles, case reports, reviews, comments, protocols, errata, and articles without sufficient information were excluded.Data were extracted by two independent authors (Jie Xu and Haiyan Yang) from each included study. Questions or disagreements were resolved by discussion or consultation with a third author (Yadong Wang). Baseline information extracted from the included literature includes author name, location, sample sizes,