Can your pet get COVID-19?

NEW YORK (AP) — Can your favored get COVID-19?

Yes, pets and different animals tin get the coronavirus that causes COVID-19, but wellness officials accidental the hazard of them spreading it to radical is low.

Dogs, cats, ferrets, rabbits, otters, hyenas and white-tailed cervid are among the animals that person tested positive, successful astir cases aft contracting it from infected people.

While you don’t person to interest overmuch astir getting COVID-19 from your pets, they should interest astir getting it from you. People with confirmed oregon suspected COVID-19 should debar interaction with pets, workplace animals and wildlife, arsenic good arsenic with different people, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

“If you wouldn’t spell adjacent different idiosyncratic due to the fact that you’re sick oregon you mightiness beryllium exposed, don’t spell adjacent different animal,” says Dr. Scott Weese astatine Ontario Veterinary College.

Not each infected pets get sick and superior unwellness is highly rare. Pets that amusement symptoms typically get mildly ill, the CDC says.

Some zoos successful the U.S. and elsewhere person vaccinated large cats, primates and different animals that are thought to beryllium astatine hazard of getting the microorganism done interaction with people.

This peculiar coronavirus most apt jumped from animals to humans in the archetypal place, sparking a pandemic due to the fact that the microorganism spreads truthful easy betwixt people. But it does not easy dispersed from animals to people. Minks are the lone known animals to person caught the microorganism from radical and dispersed it back, according to Weese.

Three countries successful bluish Europe recorded cases of the microorganism spreading from radical to mink connected mink farms. The microorganism circulated among the animals earlier being passed backmost to farmworkers.

How easy animals tin get and dispersed the microorganism mightiness alteration with antithetic variants, and the champion mode to forestall the microorganism from spreading among animals is to power it among people, Weese says.