COVID patients should avoid their pets, study reveals

If you are a pet owner, you must be accustomed to a furry tail waiting for you against the door as you come back home after a long day, while uncontrollable hugs and licks without any reason at any time of the day might seem like a usual scene. And it should be. Our furry friends deserve all the love and attention in the world, but what if you have COVID?

Since the advent of the pandemic, it has been unclear whether COVID-19 infection can be transmitted to pets through their owner or vice versa. Well, experts finally have an answer. 

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Pet owners, especially cat and dog parents, should avoid their pets while recovering from COVID, noted research conducted by the Netherlands’ team of experts. They have found that while cases of owners transmitting the virus to their pets are almost negligible, what’s a cause of concern is that if the virus somehow transmits to your pet’s body, it would act as a reservoir for the virus and can be introduced into a human.

Dr Els Broens, from Utrecht University, said, “If you have COVID-19, you should avoid contact with your cat or dog, just as you would do with other people.”

“The prime concern, however, is not the animals’ health – they had no or mild symptoms of COVID but the potential risk that pets could act as a reservoir of the virus and reintroduce it into the human population,” Dr Broens added.

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Dr Broens further said no such pet-to-owner transmission has been reported yet despite the rather high prevalence among pets from COVID positive households in this study, it seems unlikely that pets play a role in the pandemic.

The research in question was led by Dr Broens and was presented at the European Congress of Clinical Microbiology and Infectious Diseases (ECCMID). It is yet to be published in a journal.