A SARS-CoV-2: Companion Animal Transmission and Variants Classification

Abstract

The continuous emergence of novel viruses and their diseases are a threat to global public health as there have been three outbreaks of coronaviruses that are highly pathogenic to humans in the span of the last two decades, severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS)-CoV in 2002, Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS)-CoV in 2012, and novel SARS-CoV-2 which emerged in 2019. The unprecedented spread of SARS-CoV-2 worldwide has given rise to multiple SARS-CoV-2 variants that have either altered transmissibility, infectivity, or immune escaping ability, causing diseases in a broad range of animals including human and non-human hosts such as companion, farm, zoo, or wild animals. In this review, we have discussed the recent SARS-CoV-2 outbreak, potential animal reservoirs, and natural infections in companion and farm animals, with a particular focus on SARS-CoV-2 variants. The expeditious development of COVID-19 vaccines and the advancements in antiviral therapeutics have contained the COVID-19 pandemic to some extent; however, extensive research and surveillance concerning viral epidemiology, animal transmission, variants, or seroprevalence in diverse hosts are essential for the future eradication of COVID-19.

Transmission, Pathological Mechanism and Pathogenesis of SARS-1 and SARS-2

“…SARS-2 like SARS-1 and MERS transmitted from bats to human and cause respiratory syndromes [61][62][63], but SARS-2 approximately third of the 41 patient exhibit acute respiratory distress syndromes (ARDS) and 6 patients were died, similarity of the clinical signs in both SARS-1 and SRAS-2 have been reported as fever, dry cough and ground glass opacities in lobes of lung on the CT chest and dyspnea [58], other symptoms have investigated in SARS-2 patients were suffering from fatigue, headache, sputum and diarrhea which are less common in SARS-1 [64,65]. Researcher noted unique symptoms of SARS-2 that affected lower airway of respiratory tract and it distinguished by upper respiratory tract symptoms as sneezing, sore throat and rhinorrhea [66].…”

Development of primer-probe sets to rapidly distinguish single nucleotide polymorphisms in SARS-CoV-2 lineages

“…The World Health Organization (WHO) has designated five distinct variants of concern (VOC) together with numerous sub-variants that have been circulating for the last three years, which include Alpha, Beta, Gamma, Delta and Omicron. Variants being monitored (VBM) include Mu, Lamda, Kappa, Epsilon, Eta, Iota, Theta and Zeta ( Flores-Vega et al., 2022 ; Aleem et al., 2023 ; Pandit and Matthews, 2023 ). Typically, viral variants have been classified according to unique mutations identified by whole genome sequencing (WGS) of residual SARS-CoV-2 positive clinical specimens and this approach remains the clinical gold standard ( Tian et al., 2021 ; Volz et al., 2021a ; Volz et al., 2021b ; Kumar et al., 2022 , Safari et al , Kim et al., 2020 ; Naqvi et al., 2020 ; Wang et al., 2020 ).…”