Introduction.-No therapy has yet proven effective in COVID-19. Tocilizumab (TCZ) in patients with severe COVID-19 could be an effective treatment. Method.-We conducted a retrospective case-control study in the Nord Franche-Comté Hospital, France. We compared the outcome of patients treated with TCZ and patients without TCZ considering a combined primary endpoint: death and/or ICU admissions. Results.-Patients with TCZ (n = 20) had a higher Charlson comorbidity index (5.3 [±2.4] vs 3.4 [±2.6], P = 0.014), presented with more severe forms (higher level of oxygen therapy at 13 L/min vs 6 L/min, P < 0.001), and had poorer biological findings (severe lymphopenia: 676/mm 3 vs 914/mm 3 , P = 0.037 and higher CRP level: 158 mg/L vs 105 mg/L, P = 0.017) than patients without TCZ (n = 25). However, death and/or ICU admissions were higher in patients without TCZ than in the TCZ group (72% vs 25%, P = 0.002). Conclusion.-Despite the small sample size and retrospective nature of the work, this result strongly suggests that TCZ may reduce the number of ICU admissions and/or mortality in patients with severe SARS-CoV-2 pneumonia.

Background Various observations have suggested that the course of COVID-19 might be less favourable in patients with inflammatory rheumatic and musculoskeletal diseases receiving rituximab compared with those not receiving rituximab. We aimed to investigate whether treatment with rituximab is associated with severe COVID-19 outcomes in patients with inflammatory rheumatic and musculoskeletal diseases.Methods In this cohort study, we analysed data from the French RMD COVID-19 cohort, which included patients aged 18 years or older with inflammatory rheumatic and musculoskeletal diseases and highly suspected or confirmed COVID-19. The primary endpoint was the severity of COVID-19 in patients treated with rituximab (rituximab group) compared with patients who did not receive rituximab (no rituximab group). Severe disease was defined as that requiring admission to an intensive care unit or leading to death. Secondary objectives were to analyse deaths and duration of hospital stay. The inverse probability of treatment weighting propensity score method was used to adjust for potential confounding factors (age, sex, arterial hypertension, diabetes, smoking status, body-mass index, interstitial lung disease, cardiovascular diseases, cancer, corticosteroid use, chronic renal failure, and the underlying disease [rheumatoid arthritis vs others]). Odds ratios and hazard ratios and their 95% CIs were calculated as effect size, by dividing the two population mean differences by their SD. This study is registered with ClinicalTrials.gov, NCT04353609.

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Elsevier has created a COVID-19 resource centre with free information in English and Mandarin on the novel coronavirus COVID-19. The COVID-19 resource centre is hosted on Elsevier Connect, the company's public news and information website. Elsevier hereby grants permission to make all its COVID-19-related research that is available on the COVID-19 resource centre-including this research content-immediately available in PubMed Central and other publicly funded repositories, such as the WHO COVID database with rights for unrestricted research re-use and analyses in any form or by any means with acknowledgement of the original source. These permissions are granted for free by Elsevier for as long as the COVID-19 resource centre remains active. Short communication Predictive factors of mortality in patients treated with tocilizumab for acute respiratory distress syndrome related to coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19