Could Your Cat Have Long Covid?
More than 350,000 cats in the UK have caught Covid-19 throughout the pandemic, a new study has found.
It was known that cats were able to catch coronavirus, but the numbers of infection had not been calculated until now. Scientists are also learning more about the longterm impact on feline health.
The swabs of 2,309 cats that were taken to the vets in the UK between April 2020 and February 2022 for routine check-ups were analysed by virologists and veterinarians from the University of Glasgow.
Samples came from across the UK and were “broadly representative of the domestic cat population”, the scientists said.
“We looked at over 2,000 samples, and we are confident in saying that over 3% of the UK’s cat population has been exposed to Covid and mounted a neutralising response, and this has been increasing,” study author Grace Tyson, a PhD student at the MRC-University of Glasgow Centre for Virus Research said.
Though there were a large number of cat infections, currently there has only been one documented case of a person catching Covid from a cat. The 10-year-old tabby, who was living in Thailand, caught the virus from its infected owners. She then sneezed in a 32-year-old vet’s face whilst being swabbed.
“Cats that still became infected but did not produce particularly strong/effective antibody responses will not have been captured in this study, so it is likely that the number of UK cats exposed to Covid is greater than the 3.2 per cent we found here,” Tyson told The Telegraph.
The latest information from the study raises concerns about how Covid can affect cats’ general health.
“This could have implications for feline health - the actual pathology of Covid in cats is not as well characterised as in humans, but we know of some quite severe cases of fever and respiratory illness in cats as well as some complications such as cardiac problems,” Tyson said.
“In some cases, these clinical manifestations can be fatal or lead to euthanasia of the cat. We do not yet know the long-term effects of Covid in cats.”
More research is needed to determine how long Covid may present itself in cats. But if your moggie has seemed out of sorts since the height of the pandemic, you may have just found out why.
