I’ve been slow posting in the past few days, so here are a few quick recaps from the animal/COVID-19 world.
Higher quality debunking of crappy dog-SARS-CoV-2 paper
Back in April, a paper (Xia 2020) was released that suggested dogs could be the source of SARS-CoV-2. Most of us considered it crap at the
Things have been relatively quiet on the animal/COVID front for the past week or so (and that’s good). We’ll likely continue to see sporadic cases in pets that get infected from their owners. Hopefully, all of those cases will stop with the pet and there will be no further transmission to other people or animals
The SARS-CoV-2 situation in the Dutch mink industry continues to evolve. Dutch authorities are now reporting outbreaks of SARS-CoV-2 on 8 mink farms (with one more suspected), as part of their broader investigation of the industry. After identifying outbreaks on multiple mink farms, the infection was declared a reportable disease national surveillance was initiated, including
As described by ProMedMail, the Dutch Agriculture Minister has provided another update on the outbreaks of SARS-CoV-2 that have affected at least 5 mink farms in the Netherlands to date (click here for the original Dutch version of the letter).
Another suspected mink-to-human transmission of SARS-CoV-2 has been identified (with potentially infections
In the midst of outbreaks of COVID-19 on at least 5 mink farms in the Netherlands, a Reuters article reports that Dutch Agricultural Minister Carola Schouten issued a letter to parliament indicating that a farm worker was infected with SARS-CoV-2 from the mink. That’s a bit surprising to me, with the surprising aspect being
I keep saying I’m going to stop talking about sporadic new SARS-CoV-2 infections in animals unless there’s something noteworthy. I’ll mention some recent cases in a dog and some cats in the Netherlands because I think there are some unique aspects that fit that bill.
Infected dog
This infected dog was euthanized on account of
Nothing too remarkable to report, but here are a few recent developments.
Dogs
Details about the first two SARS-CoV-2-positive dogs in Hong Kong have been published in Nature. We’ve previously heard most of the information before, but here’s a quick summary:
We’ll put this in the “interesting but not really surprising” file.
When you have people with COVID-19 and they have contact with animals, there’s some risk of infecting the animals. The risk varies by animal species, but this virus seems to have the ability to infect a few different species beyond our own.
