Covid infected 'more than 350,000 pet cats' in Britain

Dec 21, 2023

Study provokes fears for feline health and also raises concerns the animals could prove an incubator for new variants

More than 350,000 cats in Britain caught Covid over the course of the pandemic, a study has suggested.

Cats have been shown previously to catch the coronavirus but the level of infection among domesticated felines has not been calculated until now.

Virologists and veterinarians from the University of Glasgow analysed swabs from 2,309 cats that were taken to vets in the UK between April 2020 and February 2022 for routine check-ups.

Samples came from across the UK and were "broadly representative of the domestic cat population", the scientists write in their paper, which is not yet peer-reviewed and is published as a pre-print.

The team found that 3.2 per cent of all the samples were positive for Covid antibodies, with the highest levels of infection occurring at the end of 2021 and at the start of 2022, with one in 20 cats testing positive.

There are believed to be around 11 million pet cats in the UK, according to the Cats Protection 2022 report, with 3.2 per cent equating to 352,000 cats having Covid.

"We looked at over 2,000 samples, and we are confident in saying that over three per cent 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, told The Telegraph.

However, she added that this was likely to be an underestimate because the method they used only tested for a specific form of antibodies.

"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," Ms Tyson said.

There has been one documented case of a person catching Covid from an infected cat, when a 10-year-old tabby living in Thailand caught the virus off its infected owners and then sneezed in a 32-year-old vet's face while being swabbed.

The cat's owners, a 32 and 64-year-old father and son pair, were sent, with their cat, to a hospital 900km away from their Bangkok home. The cat was tested and treated at a nearby vets while the owners were put into hospital isolation.

The cat caught the virus after sleeping on the owners’ beds and the vet wore a mask and gloves, indicating the virus may have infected her via her eyes during the 10-minute appointment. Both the animal and human patients made a full recovery.

Experts say cats do not shed much virus and are only infectious for a couple of days, making it much harder for them to infect someone than for a person.

The latest data gives an indication as to how widespread Covid-infected cats were and has raised concerns about the virus's impact on their health as well as the animals becoming a reservoir of disease where new variants may evolve before jumping back into people.

"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," Ms 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.

"There was a recent case in Thailand of a cat sneezing on its vet and infecting them, confirming cat-to-human transmission, and cat-to-cat transmission has also been observed experimentally so there is a concern that cats may become a reservoir for the disease, particularly since they are in such close contact with humans as pets.

"The selective pressure on the virus that comes from zoonotic jumps may cause viral mutations to occur. This is part of the reason why we believe SARS-CoV-2 research at the human-animal interface is so vital."