An article in the UK Guardian newspaper today about the possibility of coronavirus in domestic cats made people so concerned that when they heard about this, the surge in traffic to the website of the British Veterinary Association (BVA) caused it to collapse.
Basically, the BVA said that cats in households where owners were isolating with symptoms should be kept indoors. The veterinary association’s president, Daniella Dos Santos then had to clarify - “We are not advising that all cats are kept indoors. Only cats from infected households or where their owners are self-isolating, and only if the cat is happy to be kept indoors.”
So we have studied the “evidence” for this catademic of panic.
There was this one study conducted in China. The paper resulting is not yet published, and has not undergone peer review. The title of the paper is – “Susceptibility of ferrets, cats, dogs, and different domestic animals to SARS-coronavirus-2”. The authors come from - State Key Laboratory of Veterinary Biotechnology, Harbin Veterinary Research Institute, Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences and - National High Containment Laboratory for Animal Diseases Control and Prevention, Harbin.
Leet’s have a look at what was actually written in that paper:
1. “We found that SARS-CoV-2 replicates poorly in dogs, pigs, chickens, and ducks, but efficiently in ferrets and cats”. So no worries about Rover and whatever names you give to the pigs, chickens, ducks in your home. But Kitty and Freddie the Ferret as suspects.
2. Two strains of the virus were used to infect the laboratory cats, ferrets, etc. One, designated as F13-E was collected as an “environmental” sample from the Wuhan wet market. The other, designated as CTanH was isolated from a human from Wuhan. After the “intranasal inoculation” with live virus and an incubation period, the laboratory animals were euthanized to look at where the virus could be located.
3. The second experiment was done thus – one animal was inoculated and then housed with “clean animals” to determine if the infected animal could transmit to the “clean” animal.
4. All the laboratory infected animals were given very high doses of virus – 10,000 pfu – meaning plaque forming units. It is a standard term for virologists, but for the layman it means the infected animals were “blasted” with very high doses of virus.
5. What resulted was as follows – infected ferrets only showed tissue infections in the upper respiratory tract. Like nasal tissues. No big deal. Infected cats, on the other hand, showed that the virus went deeper – well into the lungs.
6. As for the experiments putting together an infected cat with an uninfected cat in a cage, there was some level of transmission noted. One of the three “naïve” cats got infected from their “partner”.
Overall, my estimation of these data from China that got the BVA and the Guardian so “exercised” was based on:
1. Very few animals. Two cats and ferrets involved in an experiment here and two or three involved in an experiment there.
2. These animals were given a 12-gauge shotgun of virus. A virus tsunami. This does not occur naturally, ever.
3. Best ignored overall.
4. So far, only ONE domestic cat has tested positive – from a home in Belgium.
So, let’s sum up:
1. The unpublished and yet to be peer reviewed paper from China cannot be in any way taken as a caution to keeping cats as pets.
2. The experimental animals were “nuked” with very high levels of intranasally administered virus that would NEVER be encountered in any normal situation. And the results are based on a pitiful number of experimental animals.
3. If you have a ferret (?) at home or a cat, do not worry. Chances are much, much greater that you will catch corona from a human than from your pet. Like by a factor of 10,000?
4. I have gone into much detail here to give you the real information.
Stay well, love your cat (and ferret), keep safe!