How Many Animal Species Have Caught COVID?

Mink get it. Hamsters get it. Cats and dogs get it. They're a few of the many animal species to have contracted COVID-19. But how many species have been affected? It's an important task, say researchers, because of the possibility that the virus could mutate into a perhaps more transmissible or virulent strain in animals and then pass back to humans. Now there's a first effort at compiling a global database of animal counts. Amélie Desvars-Larrive, professor at the University of Veterinary Medicine Vienna, and her team of Austrian researchers combed the internet for data from official sources. On July 23, her team in collaboration with the Wildlife Conservation society published the first COVID data tracking dashboard for cases in animals in Scientific Data.