Dear Editor, The outbreak of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-2019) has spread rapidly across the globe since late 2019 and has become a pandemic 1. The causative pathogen of COVID-19 is a novel strain of coronavirus named as severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2). SARS-CoV-2 is an enveloped virus with singlestranded, positive-sense RNA genome, which belongs to the genus Betacoronavirus of the family Coronaviridae, and is the third coronavirus reported to cause severe respiratory diseases, together with SARS-CoV and Middle East respiratory syndrome coronavirus (MERS-CoV). The genomic RNA of SARS-CoV-2 is~ 30 kb that contains 12 open reading frames (ORFs), encoding structural proteins envelope (E), spike (S), membrane (M), and nucleocapsid (N).

Interferon (IFN)-mediated antiviral pathway is one of the major innate immune mechanisms against invading viral pathogens, which consists of two stages including IFN activation and IFN signaling. In the former one, viral infection rapidly induces expression and secretion of type I and III IFNs. In the latter stage, secreted type I and III IFNs bind to cell surface receptors to initiate the downstream Janus kinase (JAK)-signal transducer and activator of transcription (STAT) signaling. The binding of IFNs to their receptors activates and phosphorylates the intracellular tyrosine kinases including JAK1, JAK2, JAK3, and tyrosine kinase 2 (TYK2), resulting in the subsequent