“…There is evidence to suggest that this profound hypoxemia may alter the ability of SARS-CoV-2 to infect host cells. Hypoxia has been reported to regulate the replication of a number of viruses ( Jiang et al., 2006 ; Kraus et al., 2017 ; Zhao et al., 2020a ; Zhuang et al., 2020 ), enhancing the replication of Epstein-Barr virus ( Jiang et al., 2006 ; Kraus et al., 2017 ), but suppressing HIV and influenza infection ( Zhao et al., 2020a ; Zhuang et al., 2020 ), demonstrating that the interaction between hypoxia signaling and viral infection is context specific and dependent on both the host cell and viral species. Furthermore, hypoxia has been reported to either induce or, in some cases, suppress ACE2 expression in lung pulmonary arterial smooth muscle cells (PASMCs) ( Zhang et al., 2009 , 2019 ), hematopoietic stem cell precursors ( Joshi et al., 2019 ), and hepatocarcinoma cells ( Clarke et al., 2014 ).…”