These findings indicate that targeting transcriptional inhibition of ACE2 expression may be a therapeutic avenue for prevention of severe COVID-19 infection (Qiao et al., 2020), while counteracting infection-induced ACE2 downregulation may act as a therapeutic treatment to reduce disease severity (Chatterjee and Thakur, 2020; Zhang et al., 2020b). Here, ACE2 is linked to infection.