It is common for pets to catch COVID-19 from their owners

COVID-19 is common in pet cats and dogs whose owners have the virus, according to new research being presented at the European Congress of Clinical Microbiology and Infectious Diseases (ECCMID) held online this year.

Researchers in the Netherlands studied dogs and cats of people who had tested positive for COVID-19. Some 156 dogs and 154 cats from 196 households were tested in total. Six cats and seven dogs (4.2%) had positive PCR tests and 31 cats and 23 dogs (17.4%) tested positive for antibodies.

With pets in 40/196 households (20.4%) having antibodies for the virus, the study reveals that COVID-19 is highly prevalent in pets of people who have had the disease.

The main concern, however, is not the animals' health - they had no or mild symptoms of COVID-19 - but the potential risk that pets could act as a reservoir of the virus and reintroduce it into the human population.

Fortunately, to date, no pet-to-human transmission has been reported. So, despite the rather high prevalence among pets from COVID-19 positive households in this study, it seems unlikely that pets play a role in the pandemic.