le east respiratory syndrome coronavirus (MERS-CoV) had a much higher fatality rate of 36% and infected more than 1,700 individuals (de Groot et al., 2013; Zaki et al., 2012). However, the recent SARS-CoV outbreak of 2019, also referred to as SARS-CoV-2 or COVID-19 (Chen et al., 2020), b