Minks look out of a cage at a fur farm in the village of Litusovo, northeast of Minsk, Belarus in December 2012.
Updated to include drought zones while tracking water shortage status of your area, plus reservoir levels and a list of restrictions for the Bay Area’s largest water districts. “We’ve known this was a possibility for two years,” Angela Bosco-Lauth, an infectious-disease researcher at Colorado State University in Fort Collins who was not involved in the study, told the journal. Researchers in Thailand also said they documented the first confirmed case of a pet cat infecting a veterinarian with the coronavirus in June, according to a report in Nature. Serious illness in pets is extremely rare.”īut in the early months of the pandemic, there were reports of outbreaks in which animals were believed to have infected humans, leading to government officials culling millions of mink in Denmark and hamsters in Hong Kong.
“Of the pets that have gotten sick, most only had mild illness and fully recovered. “Pets infected with this virus may or may not get sick,” the CDC says. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention believes that pets are getting infected “after close contact with people with COVID-19.” One study found that the main reason owners infect pets and not the other way around is because cats and dogs generally have lower viral loads than humans and only shed the virus for a short time. The dashboard also includes information on which virus variants infected each animal. Cases in white-tailed deer, hamsters, tigers, lions and beavers are further down the list. There have been 187 documented cases in mink, followed by 177 in cats and 160 in dogs. Scientists believe it is critical to know which animals are getting infected and what is happening to them because it could help track virus mutations and cases of animal-to-human transmission, which are still considered rare. Reported SARS-CoV-2 variants identified in animals from a new open access data dashboard on global cases. “The dashboard intends to support public education about the risk of SARS-CoV-2 transmission between humans and animals and raise public awareness about possible wildlife conservation issues posed by the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic,” said Amélie Desvars-Larrive, professor at the University of Veterinary Medicine Vienna and leader of the research team, in a study accompanying the initial data dump. While the researchers say it is impossible to know the true impact of the coronavirus in the wild, the documented cases included in the dashboard were largely confirmed with laboratory PCR tests and provide a strong foundation to build on.
So far, there have been 704 confirmed cases in animals, in 27 different species from 39 countries, according to the first dashboard of its kind from a team of Austrian researchers who worked with the Wildlife Conservation society that compiles the tally of COVID cases among animals.Īmong the 582 outbreaks tracked in the animal world, the disease fatality rate so far has been close to 3%, with most symptoms among animals presenting as respiratory, gastrointestinal or behavioral issues, according to the data.