Professor Francesca Capon provides a commentary An article recently published in the Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology1 suggests that diseases such as psoriasis and atopic dermatitis increase the risk of COVID-19 by approximately 50%.

n a recent publication in Nature Communications1 a team from Friedrich-Alexander University in Germany described their findings from a cross-sectional population cohort study on the prevalence of anti-SARS-CoV-2 immunoglobulin G (IgG) in patients with chronic immune-mediated inflammatory diseases (IMIDs) on cytokine-blocking treatments. This patient cohort was compared against subjects with IMIDs, not on cytokine inhibitors, health care workers, and healthy controls. The findings from this study showed that patients with IMID on cytokine inhibitors had a lower prevalence of anti-SARS-CoV-2 IgG response compared to the other three cohorts. To assess whether this could be accounted for by differences in social exposure between the groups, the investigators assessed exposure risk variables in the four groups and found those to be similar between the two IMID groups and less than that of health care workers.