A tiger in the Bronx Zoo has tested positive for COVID-19, so it's no surprise that cats can also be vulnerable to the new coronavirus. What pet owners should know:
April 3, 2020 -- As scientists race to learn more about COVID-19, several new studies suggest that the coronavirus that causes the disease can also infect pets, particularly cats and ferrets.experimentally infected a wide range of domestic animals with coronavirus and found that cats and ferrets can be infected with the virus and pass it other animals, too. The same study found pigs, chickens and ducks couldn’t be infected, so that’s good news.
One study tried infecting cats, ferrets, dogs, and pigs. With ferrets, it was similar to the original SARS, ferrets would get sick pretty consistently and they would infect ferrets in adjacent cages, so there was spread through indirect contact, probably droplets or aerosols. Cats and ferrets, we have a little more concern that if we infect them, they could potentially infect someone else or another animal.We have to be a bit careful how we extrapolate those findings to our home lives. Those animals were in close, prolonged contact with each other. They were living in adjacent cages. We have to be careful how we translate that to you living with your cat.
What we really want to do is keep cats that belong to people who are sick inside. Those are the cats we are worried about. If you haven’t been exposed [to COVID] and you have an 85-year-old diabetic living in your house, then I consider that an unacceptable risk. The risk is low, but the implications of that risk are very high.What precautions should you be taking if you’re looking after the pet of someone who has COVID-19?With animals, there are two things that we’re concerned about: 1) The animal’s fur being contaminated by the infected person and 2) the animal being infected.
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