In order to analyse the prevalence of cat viral diseases in China, including feline parvovirus (FPV), feline calicivirus (FCV), feline herpesvirus 1 (FHV-1), feline leukaemia virus (FeLV), feline immunodeficiency virus (FIV) and feline infectious peritonitis virus (FIPV), a total of 1,326 samples of cats from 16 cities were investigated from 2016 to 2019. Collectively, 1,060 (79.9%) cats were tested positive for at least one virus in nucleotide detection, and the positive rates of cat exposure to FeLV, FPV, FHV-1,

SARS-CoV-2 or COVID-19 has become pandemic and spread to more than 200 countries with over 24 million human infected cases (WHO 2020). The origin of SARS-CoV-2 remains unknown, though bat, pangolin, and snake were reported to be the potential animal reservoirs (Ji et al. 2020; Ward et al. 2020; Chen et al. 2020). Companion animals including dogs and cats were recent sporadically reported to be infected by SARS-CoV-2 with or without clinical symptoms (Li 2020a, b; Sailleau et al. 2020). Recently, both Chinese and American groups reported that cats were highly susceptible to SARS-CoV-2 after artificial inoculation and could spread the virus via respiratory droplets (Shi et al. 2020; Bosco-Lauth et al. 2020). Coincidently, Zhang et al. (2020) reported that 15 of 102 (14.7%) cats in Wuhan City during SARS-CoV-2 outbreak showed serological positive using an in-house indirect enzyme linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA) (Zhang et al. 2020). These reports raise a huge public concern as the infected cats could play a role in transmission of SARS-Compliance with Ethical Standards Conflict of interest The authors declare that they have no conflict of interest.

Feline calicivirus (FCV) is a highly contagious viral pathogen of upper respiratory infections and oral disease in cats. To investigate the prevalence and gene characteristic of FCV in China, a total of 1739 clinical swabs of cat eyes and nasal were collected from 19 cities in China from 2019 to 2020. The FCV from clinical samples were isolated in F81 cells, and the gene sequences of the isolated FCV’s capsid proteins were phylogenetically analyzed by constructing the phylogenetic tree with the FCV vaccine strain F9 and reference strains of other countries. Results revealed a prevalence of 13.0% (226/1739) for FCV in China in this study, and samples from Langfang showed the highest prevalence in the cities. The 74 FCV strains isolated from clinical samples shared the nucleotide identity of 73.4%-79.1% and the amino acid identity of 83%-90% comparing with the F9 strain. Phylogenetic analysis reveals two branches of these FCV strains from China, which distinct from the vaccine strains of F9 and 255, and other reference strains. Structurally, the highly variable sites of capsid protein were exposed on the protein surface between circulating strains in China and the vaccine strain F9. Overall, this study would promote the understanding of the FCV prevalence and gene characteristics in China.