Early data from the COVID-19 outbreak has shown that the complications from the disease are partly due to increases in various cytokines, including IL-6 (Chen et al., 2020; Mehta et al., 2020; Vaninov, 2020; Yang et al., 2020), and that elevated IL-6 levels may be associated with worse outcomes (Chen et al., 2020; Li et al., 2020; Wan et al., 2020). The gene discussed is IL6; the disease is COVID-19.