I’ve done countless presentations and interviews about COVID-19 and animals, and the question of whether pets can infect people always comes up.
My general line has been “We know that human-to-pet infection with SARS-CoV-2 is pretty common. My main concern is cats, since we know they can spread the virus cat-to-cat. If they can
Headline writers are probably going to screw up my day tomorrow by sensationalizing this, but a new paper in the journal Animals (Fiorito et al. 2022) describes SARS-CoV-2 infection in cattle in Italy. (It’s an MDPI journal, and I take anything published there with a big grain of salt given their low standards, but this
While we’ve learned a lot about the susceptibility of many different animal species to SARS-CoV-2, horses have been a bit of an unknown. We’ve had concerns about potential susceptibility based on the nature of the receptor the virus uses to enter host cells, but study in horses has still been limited. A lot of that
As the world tries to (prematurely) transition back to some semblance of normalcy (or at least what used to be “normal”), it’s a challenge to figure out what changes to make, and when. There will never be agreement between everybody. Some want full reversion to “normal” now, some want third-wave-level restrictions until further notice… like
Concerns about the animal aspects of the COVID-19 pandemic continue to come in waves. Most of the time they are ignored or dismissed, but there are also periodic flurries of attention and (often over-) reaction. Lately, questions about vaccination of animals against SARS-CoV-2 follow have been on the rise.
Should domestic and wild animals be
One thing we’ve been watching for with SARS-CoV-2 in animals is whether we will see establishment of “animal” variants. Humans have done an effective job of infecting a wide variety of animal species with this primarily-human virus. Fortunately, thus far these infections usually die out rapidly in that animal or group of animals (mink being
Throughout the pandemic, countless decisions have had to be made, often with limited data. As more information becomes available, guidance and recommendation are updated. That sometimes upsets people, but it’s a good thing because it means we know more. If no recommendations had changed since early 2020, it would mean that we were really intuitive
As SARS-CoV-2 continues to rip through the human population, we’re getting more information about downstream impacts, including transmission to animals. One of my talking points since the start of the pandemic has been that we want to keep this virus in the human population. If we spread it to animals, it will be much harder
It’s been a pretty chaotic week in the zoonotic SARS-CoV-2 world, with a lot of attention being paid to hamsters in Hong Kong and deer in Canada.
However, one issue that’s gotten less attention is the need to keep up with this virus as it changes, through serial waves and new variants, and to
I doubt it will involve tunnelling under the wall and fake travel documents, but the 2022 Great Hamster Escape is apparently underway in Hong Kong. It’s not surprising, following the recent heavy-handed over-reaction to finding SARS-CoV-2 in a small number of hamsters, and the attempted blame-shifting (COVID-19? No, we don’t have any of that
