MOSCOW, December 15. /TASS/. Cases when pets catch COVID-19 are rare and they don’t infect humans and so there is no reason to throw them out on the street over the fear of contamination, Vice President of the Russian Academy of Sciences Irina Donnik said on Wednesday.
"It is most important that we may sleep peacefully and animals should not be thrown out on the street and certainly, domestic animals must not be handed over. However, when news broke that domestic animals get infected, the number of homeless animals in the streets and the owners who throw them out grew 25-fold," Donnik said.
The scientist explained that cats and dogs get infected with their own coronaviruses and don’t pass these viruses to humans. Meanwhile, the infected humans should better limit contacts with animals.
According to her, people in markets create conditions that could not be present in a natural environment, where animals of non-crossing species have contact with each other. This creates risks of COVID-19 transmission between wild animals and humans. The key transmitters of the virus are bats and camels.
"Bats are an ideal incubator of new pathogenic viruses, including coronaviruses, as they can be asymptomatic virus carriers because of a limited immune and inflammatory response," Donnik specified.