Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2020/04/22/in-ny-2-cats-are-infected-wit.html
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“THEY CAN HAVE MY CATS WHEN THEY PRY MY COLD DEAD…”
“…wait, hmmm.”
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Good to know a housecat can be tested before I can.
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I dread to see what will happen when the cat-haters find out about this. Especially those who think believe they are somehow aligned with satan or whatever boogie man they believe is the evil magic guy.
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Every time my cat coughs I’m like, hairball or corona?
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Way too late. My wife does volunteer work for a shelter. The first wave of surrendered animals was weeks ago because people were afraid. The second wave was from people losing jobs and not being able to make rent (evictions hadn’t been blocked at that point, and they are only sort of half assed blocked now anyway).
So I’m going to translate differently: if you were thinking about adopting or fostering a pet and are still in a financial state to do so please stop thinking about it and do it (assuming your shelter is still allowed to do so, some are not allowed to process adoptions, but many can still do long term foster arrangements).
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It gets worse:
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Cats get tested, but Americans can’t.
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Do you want Planet of the Apes? Because this is how you get Planet of the Apes.
North America – 1991: Following a pandemic from a space-borne disease that wiped out all dogs and cats in 1983, the government has become a series of police states that took apes as pets before establishing a culture based on ape slave labor.
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Also, there’s currently no evidence that cats can re-transmit COVID to people.
Also, the humans in the first case had some sort of respiratory illness (but didn’t/couldn’t get tested) well before the cat tested positive.
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Not so concerned about cats and dogs catching covid-19 and transmitting that way (I have a dog), but just to be safe, I keep my dog on-leash and don’t let him play with other dogs or people (for my peace of mind and theirs) when I take him to off-leash open areas. I figure if someone has it, and touches/coughs on my dog, it’s in his fur. I touch his fur, I touch my face, yada yada yada. An ounce of prevention…
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Well,…
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Hmm… it’ll be interesting to see what comes out when we see some peer reviewed material. There’s a lot of info coming out in non-reviewed formats.
The artificially induced infections in that article sound a lot worse than what’s being seen in the currently very limited natural infections.
I won’t be surprised if cats can develop a similar disease to what we’re seeing in humans, but are much less likely to develop the same degree of disease.
So far the numbers simply don’t support that cats are as susceptible as humans. Even just in the USA, where cat ownership is roughly 25%, we’ve got two mildly ill cats reported? Yes, there’s probably a lot that have not been reported, but by the numbers, we should have over 180k cats infected given the roughly 738k people in the US infected. And that’s assuming each household with a cat only has one… (HA!).
It seems pretty conclusive that cats can get sars-COV2, but I’m concerned that any leap to paint them (without data supporting it) as potential vectors is likely to result in an unnecessary wave of relinquishments and euthanasias.
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Thank you.
My vet friend has reported no uptick in unexplained/unexpected respiratory incidents at the clinics they work at and we’re in WA where the outbreak largely began in the US.
Further articles have explained that this study has not been peer reviewed and simply just did not represent real world conditions.
That doesn’t mean felines can’t get it - we have seen that they can (just like with SARS-CoV) - just that it’s highly unlikely and from every report I’ve seen, felines that get sick have recovered.
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Slightly different type of virus, different type of test, does not affect availability of testing for humans.
Different how?
There’ll be more tests. Idexx just stated that they’ll run their PCR on vet submitted samples, but for now the bar is set pretty high to qualify for a test (public health officials must approve). Antech’s still holding off on allowing testing, though I understand that they’ve got a PCR as well.
The sneaky is that the labs were running their test against thousands of respiratory and GI PCR test submissions to get some sort of background info.
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