Will the cat be infected with SARS-CoV-2? Does it really spread the SARS-CoV-2 virus?

August 17, 2020 // -- Since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, scientists have been studying the potential role of animals in capturing and transmitting diseases because the SARS-CoV-2 virus that induces COVID-19 is part of a family of coronavirus that causes disease in many mammals.
There is research evidence that SARS-CoV-2 originated in bats, and now researchers have found that the coronavirus subtype to which the virus belongs has been spreading in bat populations since the 1940s;
cats are the most popular pets in the UK, with nearly 10 million cats in homes across the UK, and questions have been raised about whether cats will become infected when tigers and lions at the Bronx Zoo in New York are found to be infected with SARS-CoV-2.
addition, there have been sporadic reports in Hong Kong, Belgium and France that cats from the homes of COVID-19 patients have tested positive for SARS-CoV-2.
so is the family cat population also involved in the COVID-19 pandemic in one way or another? Photo Source: University of Cambridge began studying cats in early May to test for the presence of SARS-CoV-2, and soon researchers took routine respiratory samples from cats across the UK for SARS-CoV-2 screening, and they appealed to veterinarians to take samples from suspicious cases.
When hundreds of samples were screened, the researchers eventually detected the SARS-CoV-2 virus in a cat from the south of England, which was sampled in mid-May, and the results showed that the cat had developed antibodies to the virus, meaning that it had indeed been infected with SARS-CoV-2 before, and the researchers confirmed that it did not appear to be a simple case of sample contamination.
researchers said the cat may have contracted the virus from its owner, SARS-CoV-2, when the world's chief veterinary officer informed the World Organization for Animal Health and alerted the public.
so what does this case tell us? The study coincided with an outbreak of COVID-19 in the UK, and the researchers focused on cats with respiratory symptoms, and found an infected cat among hundreds of screen subjects, meaning that infections are rare.
Although the confirmed cat inhibited mild symptoms of the disease, including tears and snot, these symptoms appeared to be consistent with the cat's herpes virus infection, and the cat tested positive, and there is no evidence that SARS-CoV-2 made the cat sick, but fortunately the cat and its owner have made a full recovery.
so far, about 18 million people have tested positive for COVID-19, but researchers have rarely found cats infected.
Therefore, the available research evidence suggests that cats do not appear to be involved in the spread of COVID-19, however, monitoring of animals is also important, given the recent arrest and killing of 1 million otters in the Netherlands and Spain( suspected to be linked to the spread of the disease).
In the case of cat infection with SARS-CoV-2, the researchers suspect that the cat infection may simply represent an overflow of a human epidemic, and researchers are now analyzing the sequence of viral genomes in the individual cases they have found to test this hypothesis.
The results of this paper or other studies, such as those of researchers in the United States, suggest that experimental cat infections may be only temporary infections, which also provide some protection for the public to keep pets, and the researchers concluded that cats are less likely to carry coronavirus and, if any, may not be involved in the spread of COVID-19.
() References: Maciej F Boni, Philippe Lemey, Xiaowei Jiang, et al. Evolutionary origins of the SARS-CoV-2 sarbecovirus lineage responsible for the COVID-19 pandemic, Nature Microbiology (2020) doi:10.1038/s41564-020-0771-4