In a paper published in Nature, Pairo-Castineira et al. (2021) identified a significant genetic variant rs10735079 associated with critical illness of COVID-19 in the gene cluster encodes OAS1, OAS2, and OAS3. Interestingly, recent work on archaic human (Neandertal) DNA has identified an additional haplotype in the region of Chromosome 12 containing OAS1, OAS2, and OAS3 that protects against severe COVID-19 (Zeberg and Paabo, 2020). This evidence concerns the gene OAS1 and COVID-19.