From January 1, 2020–May 18, 2020, approximately 1.3 million cases of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) and 83,000 COVID-19–associated deaths were reported in the United States. MMWR reports that COVID-19 mortality is higher in persons with underlying medical conditions and in those aged ≥85 years.

Dr. Jack Cush reviews the news, tweets and journal articles from the past week on RheumNow. Let's dig into this week's 14 highlights.

The current issue of NEJM reports a novel cell type that may be used to identify rheumatoid arthritis (RA) patients who may flare.  Investigators prospectively collected blood samples from 4 patients for longitudinal RNA sequencing (RNA-seq) for discovery of moleculartranscripts that were differentially expressed before flares.

Hydroxychloroquine (HCQ) helped reduce recurrent maternal autoantibody-mediated congenital heart block (CHB) in fetuses, an open-label study suggested. Anti-SSA/Ro-positive mothers who had had a previous pregnancy complicated by CHB who took HCQ 400 mg daily, starting before completion of gestational week 10, had a 7.4% rate of clinically-relevant fetal CHB (second- or third-degree) at any time during the pregnancy.