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What's the risk that animals will spread the coronavirus? - Nature.com
Jun 01, 2020 2 mins, 20 secs

Soon after the new coronavirus started spreading around the globe, reports emerged of cases in animals — pet cats in Hong Kong, tigers in a New York City zoo and mink on farms in the Netherlands.

Now researchers are urgently trying to discover which species can catch the virus, and whether they can pass it to people.

So far, there have been only two reported cases of animals — both mink — passing the virus SARS-CoV-2 to people.

The virus could be spreading undetected in some animals that we don’t know about, says Joanne Santini, a microbiologist at University College London.

Several species, including pet dogs and cats, captive lions and tigers, and farmed mink, almost certainly caught the virus from people.

More studies should assess the susceptibility of various species and whether they can infect other animals, says Richt.

Cats, ferrets, hamsters1 and horseshoe bats were all able to pass the coronavirus to animals of the same species in the lab, and mink living in close quarters on Dutch farms have passed the infection between them.

But the fact that an animal can infect another of the same species doesn’t necessarily mean that it can infect people, says Saif.

The infections at Dutch mink farms suggest that some animals can infect people.

Looking at genomes from mink and people at two farms, Stegeman and his colleagues found that people working with the animals had probably passed the virus to some of them, which spread it to other mink.

Further unpublished genomic analysis suggests that a person on one of the farms could have been infected by the mink, says Stegeman.

That person seems to have gotten infected after starting to work with the animals, he says, so their infection probably came from the mink, rather than the other way around.

And the virus could be spreading undetected on other mink farms across Europe, North America and Asia, says Alexandersen.

The 2009 pandemic H1N1 influenza virus originated in pigs, jumped to people, spread worldwide and then passed back to pigs.

The virus continues to circulate in the animals, where it has combined with other flu viruses to create new variants that have crossed over to people, says Stegeman.

Several scientists also worry that SARS-CoV-2 could jump back and forth between cats and people, because the animals often roam between households.

Although cats can infect other felines, so far there have been no reports of cats infecting people.

Asisa Volz, a veterinary virologist at the University of Veterinary Medicine Hannover in Germany, plans to investigate whether cats spread the virus in a retirement home in Bavaria where residents separated from infected individuals still became ill.

If it turns out that cats can pass the virus to people, he says, it would become even more difficult to control the spread.

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