Can Dogs, Cats Catch COVID? Researchers Explain

According to the findings of a study, there is a possibility of new COVID variants being formed if animals are infected with the virus from humans.

There is a possibility of new COVID variants being formed if animals are infected with the virus from humans, a study has found. According to a study published in ‘PNAS’, the official journal of the National Academy of Sciences,  confirmed COVID-19 cases reported in many wild, zoo, and household animals showed “cross-species transmission”, according to a report by Asian News International.

For the study, a team of researchers at the College of Veterinary Medicine and Biomedical Sciences analysed the types of mutation that occurred in the virus following infection of animals including cats, dogs, hamsters and ferrets. “SARS-CoV-2, in the realm of coronaviruses, has a very broad species range. Generally speaking, many types of viruses can’t infect other species of animals, they evolved to be very specific,” Laura Bashor, one of the first authors and a doctoral student in the Department of Microbiology, Immunology and Pathology, said.

Erick Gagne, a first author and an assistant professor of wildlife disease ecology at the University of Pennsylvania, said,”Humans have so much exposure to many different animals which permitted this virus to have the opportunity to expose a variety of different species.”

Many researchers have come forward to examine the viral evolution of SARS-CoV-2 viral evolution of SARS-CoV-2 including University Distinguished Professor Sue VandeWoude’s laboratory at Colorado State University. These researchers in disease transmission in wild and domestic cats carried out sequence analysis and studied a “collection of genomes to SARS-CoV-2”, the report stated.

“We found there was evolution, we saw the selection on the virus, and we saw a lot of variants emerge in the genome sequence of the virus,” Laura Bashor said.

“In the animals, the cell culture variants reverted back to the initial human type, which indicates that likely there is adaption occurring in that cell culture and environment that was selected for those variants,” Erick Gagne said.

According to the findings of the study, contact exposure between two cats showed the SARS-CoV-2 variant can be “transmitted with the possibility of producing a new strain within the species”. There is no direct evidence to show the transmission of COVID from cats to humans.