Background: Data regarding the risk for severe COVID19 in patients with autoimmune or inflammatory diseases are scarce.

Objective: To estimate the risk of those patients to develop a more severe COVID19 infection

Methods: All active patients and those with dermatologic and/or rheumatologic autoimmune/inflammatory diseases were identified in a single tertiary center. The charts of those tested positive for COVID19 between March 1 st and May 31 st , 2020 reviewed including demographics, co-morbidities and medications. COVID19 outcome of those with dermatologic and/or rheumatologic autoimmune/inflammatory diseases were compared to COVID19 infected matched controls without an autoimmune/inflammatory background.

Results: Overall, 974 of 381,268 active patients were tested positive for COVID19, including 35 out of 13225 with dermatologic and/or rheumatologic autoimmune/inflammatory diseases. No statistically significant difference in severity of COVID19 infection or mortality rate was found. The rate of asymptomatic, mild, moderate, severe/critical and fatal COVID19 infection was 11.4%, 37.1%, 22.8%, 11.4% and 17.1% respectively for the patients with autoimmune diseases and 17.8%, 45.8%, 10.9%, 6.8% and 18.4% respectively for the controls .

Conclusions: Patients with autoimmune/inflammatory diseases seem not to develop a more severe COVID19 infection than controls.

Keywords: Inflammatory disease, COVID19 infection, Autoimmune diseases