Dr. Alvin Wells gives a primer on Telerheumatology and Telemedicine in the era of COVID-19. This 1 hour Grand Rounds Presentation includes a 30 minute lecture, followed by stimulating 30 minutes of Q&A with a rheumatology attendee audience.

Early reports on the COVID-19 pandemic allude to a cytokine storm or hyper-inflammation, especially in patients who succumbed to the illness. These conclusions are based on elevated levels of ferritin and other inflammatory markers, drawing comparisons to rare diseases of uncontrolled systemic inflammation such as hemophagocytic lymphohistiocytosis (HLH), and macrophage activation syndrome (MAS).

 Patients with rheumatoid arthritis (RA) treated with abatacept (Orencia) had a lower risk of developing diabetes mellitus compared with those receiving certain tumor necrosis factor (TNF) inhibitors, a large cohort study suggested.

Journal of Experimental Medicine has published a paper from a consortium of researchers at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, the Feinstein Institutes for Medical Research, and the Research Institute of the McGill University Health Centre (RI-MUHC) on the potential of neutrophil extracellular traps (NETs) as the cause of the more severe manifiestations of COVID-19 infections.