I forgot to post about the updated decision tree for owner/patient screening in vet clinics. It’s an updated version of the document we prepared earlier to help identify and manage higher risk situations. The pdf version is available here.
We also have a Russian translation courtesy of Dr. Varvara Solovyeva. It’s downloadable here.
Disclaimer #1 is my standard “COVID-19 is almost exclusively a human disease. Information about this virus in animals is important to investigate and consider, but don’t over-react.”
Disclaimer #2 is that this post is about another paper that’s available as a pre-print, meaning it hasn’t yet undergone peer review. However, it provides some useful
I think most people agree that the best thing we can do with pets of people with COVID-19 is to keep them in the home with the owner. However, what do we do with someone’s pet if they have to be admitted to the hospital and they live alone? Someone needs to take care of
Here is the version française of the client-oriented video I made earlier this week about social distancing at veterinary clinics.
We’ll soon reach the time when I won’t bother reporting on every new instance of SARS-CoV-2 infection in an animal in contact with an infected person, but at this stage a little more discussion is probably still warranted. As part of Hong Kong’s One Health approach to COVID-19 (one that is sadly very rare), they
Hot on the heels of the experimental study of SARS-CoV-2 in ferrets that I discussed a couple days ago is another new study, available in pre-print, that looked at susceptibility to SARS-CoV-2 in a slightly wider range of animals, including ferrets, cats, dogs, pigs and poultry (Shi et al. 2020). Bear in mind that
A couple of new guideline documents have been released.
First up, a Canadian COVID-19 FAQ for veterinarians, created by a working group of Canadian public health and animal health experts (French translation to come).
Also, there’s a revised version of animal shelter guidelines from the US: “Interim recommendations for intake of companion animals
I took a break from COVID-19 to play around with some animation (of… well, COVID-19 stuff. It was still a nice diversion though).
Anyway, here’s a quick animation for pet owners about social distancing practices in veterinary clinics. It was my first crack at animation, but if anyone wants to use it, you should be
Based on what we knew from the original SARS virus and the similarity with SARS-CoV-2 (the cause of COVID-19), we expected ferrets to be one of the species that could be susceptible to infection with the latter. When ferrets were infected with the SARS virus, they got sick (unlike cats that just shed the virus).
I’ve written several posts in the last two weeks about social distancing and small animal veterinary clinics. They’ve mostly focused on social distancing between veterinary personnel and pet owners. However, veterinary clinics almost always have multiple people working in the clinic itself, and sometimes close contact between staff is unavoidable. I’m getting lots of
