
Originally Posted by
verminaard
The virus is a generalist that seems to be able to cause infection in a lot of species. This has been known for awhile. They did some study on stray cats in Wuhan and a significant % of them had the virus. I haven't heard any stories about dogs or cats getting seriously sick, so maybe the pathology is a lot milder.
Also, it is unknown if humans can catch it from cats/dogs or if it is just the other way around. Sometimes generalists viruses can infect multiple species, but not all species can transmit.
did the dog actually have an infection, or was it simply environmental contamination? because once again we see an article correlating presence of the virus + behavior with infection, and that strikes me as a bit of a leap potentially.
like my big concern with all this from the outset was mosquitos being a transmission vector (its certainly small enough to make the cut) but apparently the blocker there is that if the virus doesnt actually set up a living colony in the mosquito, it cant actually propagate through the usual channels associated with say, west nile. so the whole 'pets are disease vectors' narrative seems like it needs some hard data.
and its frankly insane that we dont have any yet, but whatever moving on.
in other news, 3% of chinese people living near bat caves have coronavirus antibodies, which also lends itself to the species crossover remix theories, but obviously none of them have caused pandemics despite living near those caves for thousands of years, literally.
man i wish we had first world government pandemic response resources.