LAUSR

Sir, We are grateful for the correspondence from Cavalcante and colleagues regarding our review, “Potential influence of COVID-19/ACE2 on the female reproductive system” (Jing et al., 2020). Currently, COVID-19 is spreading rapidly throughout the whole world. Undoubtedly, a thorough exploration of COVID-19 is urgently needed because the SARS-CoV-2 is a newly emerging pathogen and a lot of characteristics of it are still unknown. As mentioned, “science is made from hypotheses that need to be confirmed or refuted”. The potential impact of SARS-CoV-2 on the male reproductive system is such a typical example. Articles published in February predicted that SARS-CoV-2 might damage the testicles, spermatogonia, leydig and sertoli cells (Fan et al., 2020; Wang and Xu, 2020). Yet, two subsequent studies failed to detect SARS-CoV-2 in semen and testicle (Pan et al., 2020, Song et al., 2020). It was not until May that six semen samples were found to be positive for SARS-CoV-2 (Li et al., 2020). However, whether there was residual live virus or viral nucleic acid needs further confirmation. We propose that the study of the association between SARS-CoV-2 and reproduction is key to the long-term prevention and control of COVID-19. A study has found that the longest interval between discharge from an Ebola treatment unit and collection of a positive semen sample was 565 days (Soka et al., 2016). Similar results were also found in a study on Zika virus (Atkinson et al., 2016). Further, there has been a case of a female who died of Ebola after sexual