There is not a coronavirus but coronaviruses!
Our pets like dogs and cats can certainly harbor coronaviruses but they are different viruses from the one that is making the headlines at the moment.
Coronaviruses that affect dogs and cats are responsible for digestive diseases associated with diarrhea. They have been known for many, many years and there has never been any scientific evidence of animal-to-human transmission of the viruses that affect dogs and cats.
Conversely, there is currently no evidence that dogs or cats can be infected with the SARS-Cov 2 coronavirus, the virus currently responsible for the COVID-19 epidemic.
In reality, the term coronavirus is a generic term that encompasses a very wide variety of viruses that look the same when observed under an electron microscope.
Thus, on the one hand there are coronaviruses that affect dogs and cats and on the other hand coronaviruses that affect humans, without there being evidence of the passage of the virus from our animals from pet to man or from man to pet.
Only one dog tested positive in Hong Kong
At present, only a dog owned by a Hong Kong woman sick with COVID-19 has tested weakly positive on February 28, which has led to a preventive quarantine of all pets in the affected people on the island for 14 days.
Unfortunately, many Chinese households have already succumbed to psychosis by abandoning thousands of dogs and cats to their fate in several major Chinese cities such as Wuhan, Beijing, Dalian or Xi'an.
If the virus was found in the nasal cavities of a dog, the animal is however doing very well and shows no signs of the disease. According to specialists interviewed by 30 Million Friends and according to the World He alth Organization, it would therefore be a simple environmental contamination and not proof of transmission between a human and a domestic animal.
To the question can dogs (and cats) catch or transmit the coronavirus responsible for COVID-19, the answer is therefore no. The current epidemic therefore does not justify giving up - or worse, to euthanize - his animal!