Response to “COVID-19 in persons with haematological cancers”

We read with interest the article titled “COVID-19 in persons with haematological cancers” by Wenjuan He et al. published recently [ 1 ]. The authors conducted a retrospective cohort study of 13 hospitalized patients with hematological malignancies (PHM) from Wuhan, China, who developed coronavirus infectious disease 2019 (COVID-19) and compared their clinical characteristics and outcomes with eleven hospitalized health care providers (HCP). They showed that COVID-19 led to more severe disease and significantly higher case fatality rate (CFR) of 62% in PHM compared to zero in HCP ( P = 0.002). We acknowledge these findings since data on COVID-19 infections in PHM have been scarce so far, but we see important limitations that were not explicitly addressed in the article. Furthermore, we present our own retrospective cohort data from Graz, Austria, which differs in terms of demographics and outcome.