As a contribution to the understanding of the current COVID-19 pandemic, we want to refer to two recently published articles, one in Microbial Cell and one in our sister journal Cell Stress . The Viewpoint article in Microbial Cell discusses the evidence linking autophagy and coronaviruses while the Editorial article in Cell Stress focuses on epidemiological, clinical and immunological features and hypotheses of coronavirus infections. Of course, both are open access and can be retrieved article directly via the journal’s website or via PMC.