For this subset of patients with life-threatening COVID-19, we suggest that therapeutic intervention with IFNβ may have life-saving effects, particularly because added IFNβ provides a robust anti-viral response to SARS-CoV-2 cells (Fig 1) and due to its divergent sequence to other IFN-Is, should escape IFNα/IFNω antibody-mediated neutralization. This evidence concerns the gene IFNA2 and COVID-19.