The last few months has been a wild ride! We didn’t mean to take such a long (but much needed) break. Some personal family things happened, and we have one more event soon, and then somehow COVID infiltrated my home.
It got me to thinking about a lot of things, but in this post, I wanted to talk about some studies I remembered were being conducted years ago. Do dogs get COVID?
Zoonotic Disease
Zoonotic Diseases are diseases that can spread between people and animals. It’s more common than we think. In fact, one of these diseases you already know about: rabies. Rabies is usually transferred from bats, who surprisingly don’t suffer from the disease but carry it around, nonetheless. It’s transferred via saliva from an animal or person and, as you probably already know, is a very deadly and serious disease that can only be cured in a very short window. That’s why people who are bitten by wild animals will often get the rabies shots before they even know if the animal had rabies. Other diseases include:
- Lyme Disease, carried by ticks
- Salmonella, which can happen from eating raw chicken
- Anthrax, which can come from cattle, horses, even dogs!
- Ebola, carried by monkeys and other wild apes.
- West Nile virus, carried by mosquitos.
And this is just a small list of things that can be transmitted to humans. There are many more, some of them common to the United States, and some that aren’t. Then, can COVID be transmitted to dogs?
COVID and Your Doggo
The surprising answer is, yes, dogs can get COVID. This answer didn’t come easily either. As we all know, COVID originated in China, but many people doubted the Chinese authorities official statement that it came from a wet market in Wuhan. With Chinese officials also barring outside scientists from taking a closer look, many people still doubt that this is the official story.
COVID is part of a larger group of viruses that are largely responsible for colds. Their corona pattern also gave COVID the nickname “Corona” or just “Rona”. Surprisingly, dogs can also get colds, according to the AKC. Well, this was surprising to me, but it many people I’ve spoken to in my day-to-day life already knew this so you may have known that dogs have their own coronaviruses. A coronavirus is a large family of viruses that include COVID-19 as well as others and is named for the series of viruses that cause humans to get a cold have the same corona(Latin for crown)-like spikes and is a large family that includes Middle East respiratory Syndrome (MERS), and Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS).
The good news is that dogs aren’t easily infected with COVID-19, at least not directly from their humans. Though, it’s hard to find studies that say for certain if dogs present with symptoms. One study found that dogs who tested positive were mostly asymptomatic, but the CDC suggests that pets may show signs that we would show like difficulty breathing, coughing, and a fever.
Is there a vaccine for doggos?
As far as I could tell, there was no COVID vaccine for dogs. However, there are other respiratory virus vaccines out there such as Kennel cough and Bordatella, vaccines that should be given once every 1-3 years.
Conclusion
This was a shorter post this time around since most of what I found was seemingly contradictory. There just wasn’t a lot of studies that have been done surrounding pets and COVID, but regardless, many experts agree on one thing: if you have COVID you should try to isolate from your pets as much as possible. The chances are low that you can pass it on, but do you really want to risk it?
ADHDoggo 