Scientists have come up with the conclusion that our companion animals, ferrets, cats and dogs are most susceptible to a coronavirus infection after humans but the truth of the matter is that cat lovers don’t care about this. They’re just not interested and the authorities will be unable to create any regulations which try and force people to keep social distance from their cats or dogs. Or which prevent them from kissing and cuddling them. It just won’t happen. Cat lovers don’t believe the risk and anyway you can’t force them to do something which is instinctively natural especially after 9 months of lockdowns.
The fact that scientists can come to this conclusion is academic and impractical. The scientists decided that animal susceptibility to an infection of Covid-19 was as follows, in descending order:
- Humans
- Ferrets
- Cats, civets and dogs
- Ducks, rats, mice, pigs and chickens (low to no susceptibility)
The idea behind the research is to know where potential animal reservoirs of the virus can be found, from where it might re-emerge at a later date, said the study author Luis Serrano from the Centre for Genomic Regulation (CRG) in Spain.
The mink is related to the ferret so the fact that ferrets are the most susceptible animal, after the human-animal, confirms why Denmark’s mink farms have been wiped out by Covid-19. You may remember that Denmark culled the entire population of mink farms because they believed that a mutated version of the coronavirus was inside these animals. They burried the animals but then found that gases were being emitted from the carcasses which came to the surface, polluting the air and perpetuating the spread of the disease. They also realised that the water table was being polluted so they burnt the carcasses. Quite a farrago, in truth.
I’m not going to describe how they figured out that certain animals are more susceptible than others because it is highly scientific except to say that they used computer modelling to see how the coronavirus uses its spike proteins. We are all familiar with these spikes sticking out of the virus. They are used to infiltrate the cells of different animals.
The spike protein binds with what is called the ACE2 receptor, a bit like a key going into a lock. There are variants of this receptor which accounts for the variation in susceptibility to contracting the disease.
The study was published in the journal PLOS Computational Biology.
