What Does the COVID-19 Pandemic Mean for Rheumatology Patients?

The COVID-19 outbreak has resulted in uncertainty for patients with autoimmune rheumatic diseases for several reasons. They are concerned about their risk of developing COVID-19 as many are immune suppressed from their disease and/or treatment, whether they should stop their advanced therapies, if they will have a worse outcome if/when infected due to their underlying medication condition(s) and if they will have drug availability, especially with press (without much data) coverage suggesting hydroxychloroquine may be used in COVID-19 infection causing diversion of medication supply. This article discusses how the pandemic affects people with systemic autoimmune rheumatic diseases.

Preliminarily, articles seem to suggest that patients with rheumatic diseases may not have more infections from SARS-CoV-2 and similar outcomes to age and gender matched patients, but fear of rheumatic medications increasing their risk, drug shortages, and work exposure all are concerns for patients.

The long term effects of the pandemic in patients with rheumatic diseases will not be known until much later and likely include stressors flaring disease (fear, illness, job loss, social isolation), post-traumatic stress, flaring due to stopping medications, less physician visits with subsequent under-treatment, and increases in chronic concomitant fatigue, pain, fibromyalgia.