On 26 December 2019, a 41-year-old male was admitted to the Central Hospital of Wuhan, presenting with fever, dizziness and an unproductive cough [1]. The patient, a worker at a seafood market in Wuhan, was one of the first reported cases of a newly emerging severe respiratory disease, which we now know as COVID-19. Metagenomic analysis of a sample of the patient’s bronchoalveolar lavage fluid revealed that the causative agent of COVID-19 is a coronavirus (CoV); named SARS-CoV-2, owing to its phylogenetic relatedness to a group of SARS-like coronaviruses (genus Betacoronavirus, subgenus Sarbecovirus).