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Cats Can Spread COVID-19 to Other Cats and Show No Symptoms

“If a pet owner looked at them... they wouldn’t have noticed anything.”

Cats can be carriers of COVID-19 and spread the virus to other cats without ever showing any sign of illness, a new lab experiment has found. Scientists at the University of Wisconsin School of Veterinary Medicine used a sample of the virus taken from a human patient and infected three cats with it before placing those cats with three other virus-free ones. Within five days, the healthy cats placed with infected cats were found to have contracted it as well. But in all six cats, there was never any indication the animal was ill. “There was no sneezing, no coughing, they never had a high body temperature or lost any weight,” virus expert Peter Halfmann was quoted as saying by the Associated Press. “If a pet owner looked at them... they wouldn’t have noticed anything.” The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has deemed the risk of animals spreading COVID-19 to people to be “low,” but the authors of the lab experiment say their work proves it’s necessary to “further investigate the potential chain of human-cat-human transmission.”