It should be noted that in these three studies, serum concentrations of IFN-β were undetectable in COVID-19 patients (Trouillet-Assant et al., 2020a; Blanco-Melo et al., 2020; Hadjadj et al., 2020), suggesting absent IFN secretion by the pulmonary epithelia. Here, IFNB1 is linked to COVID-19.