Since late 2019, an outbreak of a new severe respiratory disease in humans of unknown etiology emerged at first in Wuhan, China and quickly spread all over the world [1,2]. Subsequently, Chinese health authorities identified the causative agent of this new clinical disease as a novel coronavirus, named SARS-CoV-2, leading to the designation of the disease as COVID-19. The rapid global spread and high mortality rate prompted the WHO to declare it a pandemic on 11 March 2020 [3].
