Hong Kong officials said Tuesday that they will slaughter roughly 2,000 animals after 11 hamsters tested positive for the COVID-19 at a pet store where an employee was also affected.
Authorities told Voice of America that the city would also ban the selling of hamsters and the import of small animals. A pet store employee tested positive for the COVID-19 Delta strain on Monday, as did other hamsters imported from the Netherlands at the business.
Local media said anyone who purchased a hamster after Dec. 22 should surrender the creatures. Close contacts of COVID-positive patients will be quarantined for two weeks under the city's tight quarantine restrictions.
People walk past a pet shop where an employee and a customer later tested positive for Covid-19 after handling hamsters, in the Causeway Bay area of Hong Kong on January 18, 2022, sparking the city's government to plan a cull of more than 1,000 of the animals after some tested positive for coronavirus as well.
Hong Kong to Kill Thousands of Hamsters Due to COVID-19
According to The Wall Street Journal, the city's hamster cull comes after the infection of a 23-year-old female employee at a pet shop named Little Boss in the city's Causeway Bay region earlier this week. According to authorities, a 67-year-old lady who visited the business on Jan. 8 also tested positive.
The Washington Post said the two groups of hamsters, which originated in the Netherlands and arrived in Hong Kong on Dec. 22 and Jan. 7, were classified as "high-risk" for carrying the novel coronavirus. Eleven of the hamsters tested positive. According to the health officials, the hamsters turned over by pet owners will be slaughtered to "cut the transmission chain. Hong Kong has maintained a "zero COVID' strategy and is focused on eliminating the disease.
Leung Siu-fai, head of Hong Kong's Agriculture, Fisheries and Conservation Department, said quarantining and observing these thousands of hamsters is challenging as the incubation period might take time.
Sophia Chan, Hong Kong's secretary for food and health, also stated that there is no worldwide proof that pets may transmit COVID-19 to people.
For safety purposes, Chan stated that they will take preventive steps for any transmission pathways that cannot be ruled out to reduce the possibility of COVID-19 spread.
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COVID-19-Positive Animals
The chance of animals conveying the virus to humans is "minimal," according to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. But it might be passed from people to animals during close contact." The exception appears to be minks, known to infect people.
Science Times reported that a tiger from the Bronx Zoo tested positive with COVID-19 in 2020. According to health officials, she contracted the illness from a zoo staffer but was asymptomatic.
Many pet owners were alarmed by the huge cat's diagnosis. Chinese researchers discovered that dogs have a low vulnerability to the virus while domestic cats and ferrets are vulnerable to airborne infection with the coronavirus.
However, it looks that man's best buddy might contract the illness. According to health officials, a dog that tested positive for the virus in Hong Kong at the outset of the epidemic was thought to be the first example of human-to-animal transmission.
According to Reuters, three pet cats in China were put down in September 2021 after testing positive for COVID-19, causing outrage on social media.
COVID-19 cases in Denmark were blamed on mink in Danish farms, according to the Danish authorities. Per Associated Press, the officials sought to slaughter millions of mink to reduce the danger of transmission after a report revealed that 12 persons infected by minks had a viral mutation.
BBC News said mass graves were excavated to contain the corpses of the 17 million minks slaughtered in the aftermath of the pandemic. The cull proved disastrous for many fur producers.
After catching the illness in August, more than 12,000 mink in Utah have perished. According to a spokeswoman for the Utah Department of Agriculture and Food, about 10,000 mink have perished in Utah fur farms by October 2020. Dr. Dean Taylor, the state veterinarian, told the Associated Press that no animals were killed as a result of the infection.
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