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The search for animals harbouring coronavirus — and why it matters

Scientists are monitoring pets, livestock and wildlife to work out where SARS-CoV-2 could hide, and whether it could resurge.
  1. Smriti Mallapaty

    1. Smriti Mallapaty is a senior reporter in Sydney, Australia.

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Cartoon of a cat, bats, ferret, mink and pig holding name cards as if in a police lineup with a virus shaped spotlight on them

Illustration by David Parkins

It was the news Sophie Gryseels had been dreading for months. Almost a year into the pandemic, a seemingly healthy wild mink tested positive for SARS-CoV-2 in Utah. No free-roaming animal was known to have caught the virus before, although researchers had been watching for this closely. “It’s happened,” wrote Gryseels, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Antwerp, Belgium, in an e-mail to her colleagues.

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Nature 591, 26-28 (2021)

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-021-00531-z

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