Can our pets catch Covid-19?
For nearly 18 months, we have been worrying about whether we or someone we love will catch Covid-19. But have you ever stopped and thought about whether your pet will catch Covid?
When humans come in contact with germs and bacteria, we don’t always get sick. Otherwise, we would get sick every other day. This also applies to dogs. Even if you’re worried about your dog catching Covid-19, it seems that the virus affects them differently compared with humans.
The Covid-19 virus, also called the SARS-CoV-2, functions just like any other type of virus. They possess the ability to change into multiple different variants. Each one of these changes is called a mutation. There are currently five different variants of Covid-19 as determined by the Centre for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
However, it seems like the Covid-19 virus affects humans and animals differently. For humans, the symptoms of Covid-19 include fever, dry cough, and tiredness. However, dogs and cats that tested positive for Covid-19 showed little to no symptoms.
The reason that dogs and cats are not affected by COVID as much is because of the way the virus enters their body. Think of your body like a giant lock. When a key (a virus in this instance) fits perfectly into the lock, then the virus is able to enter your body. Fortunately, the ‘lock’ between humans and dogs are very different. Thus a key which matches the ‘lock’ of a human body will not match the ‘lock’ of a dog. But do you know which other animal has a ‘lock’ that is similar to humans? BATS!!!!
Origin of Covid-19
Since bats have a similar ‘lock’ to humans, scientists believe that the Covid-19 virus originated in bats. It is believed that the virus was transmitted to humans through the consumption of these animals in China. A virus which can spread from animals to humans is described as ‘zoonotic’. A more common ‘zoonotic’ disease is rabies. Thus if a person is bitten by a rabid animal (an animal affected with rabies), there is a high likelihood that the person will be infected with rabies.
So what about wild animals?
It is possible for other animals to catch Covid-19. There have been a few instances where zookeepers accidentally gave the animals the virus. In New York, a zookeeper accidentally infected some of their big cats. The same thing happened with gorillas in San Diego. As gorillas are a close relative of humans (evolutionary speaking), they had similar symptoms as humans.
As for the wild animals that are far away from any kind of human interactions, there hasn’t been enough research conducted to determine they have been affected by the coronavirus. Fortunately though, some researchers are looking at this right now.
