We have read Leung's comment.1 Thanks for readers' attention and valuable feedback on our article.2 Following was our response to Leung's question about data overlap. First, the meta-analysis reprocessed the existing data about patients with COVID-19 in published articles and involved no other information outside of the article. Second, each patients' regions, hospitals, departments, time periods of when they hospitalized, and other detailed information can be precisely distinguished only when the original data were obtained. Thus, whether data overlap existed was still uncertain. We contacted the corresponding authors to obtain the original data, but we have not received a reply yet. Finally, we agree that readers are advised to interpret the results with caution. When we acquire original data, we will reprocess data to make sure if data overlap existed and if necessarily, we will provide the finally revision of our study publicly. All the authors declare that there are no conflict of interests.
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Li et al. (2020) studied this question.
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