Relevance: Prelims: Science and technology
Why in news?
- A Malayan tiger at New York’s Bronx Zoo has tested positive for SARS-CoV2. Four-year-old Nadia is believed to have caught the virus from a zoo employee, who had not shown symptoms.
Key highlights:
- The virus came from an animal source and mutated; humans have since been infecting humans. It is theoretically possible for the virus to mutate again to survive in certain species after being transmitted by humans.
- The Bronx Zoo case suggests an employee spread the virus to the tiger, the US Department of Agriculture said in a statement.
- Several lions and tigers at the zoo, in fact, have shown symptoms of respiratory illness. The others were not tested to limit the potential risks of general anesthesia.
Domestic animals
- There have been a handful of cases of pets being infected; the indications are they caught it from humans.
- There have been reports about two dogs in Hong Kong — a Pomeranian and a German shepherd — testing positive. While their respective humans had COVID-19, the dogs themselves were not showing symptoms.
- In what has more context in the Bronx Zoo tiger testing positive, there has been a domestic cat, too, catching the virus, in Belgium. Unlike the dogs, the cat showed symptoms. After testing positive, it later recovered.
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