It is needed to pay more attention to the relatively high prevalence of pulmonary embolism (PE) in COVID-19 patients, especially in ICU wards. Future studies that will explore the detection method considering high infectivity of COVID-19 and antithrombotic treatment balancing the risk of thrombosis and the risk of bleeding are needed.

Among 1981 potentially related studies, 49 articles (52 studies) comprising 20,523 COVID-19 patients were enrolled in this meta-analysis after rigorous screening.

Due to the obvious heterogeneity, we performed subgroup analysis and meta-regression. None of these factors we explored further was significantly correlated with the inter-study heterogeneity on subgroup analysis.

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