By Scott Weese on June 19, 2020

Things have been relatively quiet on the animal/COVID front the past week or so. (That’s good).

 We’ll likely continue to see sporadic cases in pets, who get infected from their owners. Hopefully, all of those will stop with the pet and not get passed on further to people or other animals, (including, perhaps most concerningly, wildlife or community cats).

I suspect the next big wave of companion animal info will come out when serological (antibody) testing lets us get an idea of how often human-pet transmission has occurred.

Most of the limited testing to date has focused on testing swabs for the virus. That lets us know if they’re actively infected but it’s a slow process since we have to identify infected households and go to them for sampling during the fairly short window when the pet might be infected. We’re going to underestimate transmission that way. So, combining those studies with antibody testing, which can be done more easily after-the-fact is important.

Mink

This virus really likes mink.

In addition to widespread outbreaks on Dutch mink farms, it’s now been identified in Denmark. These start off with mink getting infected by people, but the mink can spread it amongst themselves and sometimes send it back to people. The fact that stray cats on farms have been infected is concerning and shows why we want to prevent that initial human-animal transmission. We want to keep this a strictly human issue, since that’s easier to control.