The host is not picky about it. Pets, livestock, and even wild animals have all been affected by the virus.
Cats are more susceptible to contracting COVID than we are, and it is unlikely that they will pass the virus back to us. There appears to be low transmission.
There is always a chance that the disease could spread to a community of free-roaming cats and dogs.
Scientists are trying to find out if there is a variant of COVID in our household pets. It seems like there is little to worry about.
The case of a domestic house cat in southeastern Pennsylvania was diagnosed as having a disease in September of 2021. The same variant of the Delta variant that was circulating amongst humans in the area at the time has been identified by subsequent genome testing.
It's unfortunate that newer versions of COVID are still spilling over to our pets. The results suggest the virus may not be changing much in our cats.
The domestic cat's sample contained 10 single nucleotide variants, but less than 5 percent of human samples contained them.
Seven of the 10 genes were silent, meaning they did not cause much change.
When we looked at a random sample of humans from our area, there wasn't anything different about our cat's sample.
Our conclusion was that the cat was not affected by a virus that was different.
The study is the first to identify a variant of domestic cats in the US. The authors became aware of another cat from Virginia that had contracted the AY.3 variant about a month earlier.
It is a good sign that the cat-derived AY.3 genomes have few single nucleotide variants compared to human-derived samples.
The authors say a larger dataset is needed to draw the conclusion that some of these mutations may be enriched in samples from cats.
In the domestic cat from Pennsylvania, a fecal test did not identify the disease, but a nasal swab did. The cat could have been tested after the infection had progressed from nose to butt, or it could be that it was a different type of virus.
Some humans who contract COVID show fecal samples that are positive more than a week after their respiratory tract results drop below detectable levels.
The importance of sampling at multiple body sites was highlighted by this.
If we had just done a nasal swab, we wouldn't have detected this.
The cat was brought in for medical care because it had been sick for several days. The owner of the pet had been isolated from their pet for fear that they would get sick from the disease.
It was too late to get a sample from the pet owner to compare the two infections, which means we don't know what caused the cat to get COVID.
The fact that this is the first official report of a cat contracting the AY.3 lineage suggests that we can't be lulled into a false sense of security.
Lennon says that as different versions of the disease emerge, they seem to be retaining the ability to cause a wide range of diseases.
Bats and pangolins are likely to be the source of the closely related pathogens. The virus began to evolve after it jumped to humans. Animals like deer mice can now be exposed to the virus because of some of the changes.
COVID has an ever-changing nature and poses a danger to humans and animals. Even though cats don't seem to be driving anything, that doesn't mean that will always be the case.
The study was published in a journal.
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