How India is handling human to animal transmission of COVID-19 (or not)
The Indian government issued advisories for testing and treating the novel coronavirus in animals. Just how executable are they?
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Editor's note: Her name is Nadia, and she was the first of her kind to be tested for SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19 in humans. This was 13 months ago, and she was four years old at the time. Keepers noticed that she’d developed a dry cough, so they sedated her and performed the same diagnostics and blood work performed on humans who present symptoms. The results of those tests made Nadia, a Malayan tiger at New York City’s Bronx Zoo, the first wild-but-captive animal to be diagnosed with COVID-19. But things were just getting started for the zoo. In the weeks that followed, six other big cats—three African lions, two Siberian tigers and Nadia’s sister—displayed a loss of appetite and the same, telling dry cough as Nadia before them. Their bodies had turned hosts to SARS-CoV-2. There was unbridled panic, because we knew squat about COVID-19 transmission this time last year. Just before the Bronx Zoo cases, two dogs in Hong Kong—a German Shepherd and a Pomeranian—had become the first recorded cases of SARS-CoV-2 in pets. Then came infected pet …
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