In December 2019, several cases of an unidentified pneumonia occurred in the province of Hubei, China. With the use of next-generation sequencing, the Wuhan Institute of Virology identified a new coronavirus as the etiological agent [1,2]. This new virus, which belongs to the genus betacoronavirus, was initially acknowledged as novel coronavirus 2019 (2019-nCOV) [3]. On 11 February 2020, the virus was officially renamed the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) by the International Committee on Taxonomy of Viruses [4]. Since then the virus has rapidly spread and on the 18th of July 2020, over 14 million confirmed cases and 600 000 direct casualties have been reported [5]. So far, implementation of strict quarantine measures have contained further exponential spreading of the virus in Europe and have flattened the first epidemic curve.