On the one hand, elevated systemic IFN responses appear to be associated with severe COVID-19 (Lee and Shin, 2020; Zhou et al., 2020; Zhu et al., 2020), while there is also evolving evidence that SARS-CoV-2 may evade type I and III IFN responses at the level of the airway epithelium (Totura and Baric, 2012; Park and Iwasaki, 2020; Sa Ribero et al., 2020) which may allow the virus to replicate more efficiently potentially setting the stage for a later dysregulated immune response systemically. This evidence concerns the gene IFNA1 and COVID-19.