Conducting research in a pandemic: The power of social media

Introduction The COVID-19 pandemic has disrupted the way that clinical care is delivered and research is conducted. Clinical encounters have been postponed or transitioned to telehealth, research laboratories throughout the world have shut down, and many clinical research studies have been suspended. At the same time, there has never been such an urgent need to understand, prevent, and find effective treatments for a disease. At the time of this writing, SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, has infected more than seven million people around the world and caused the deaths of almost half a million people, less than six months after it was first identified (1).