People infect animals that infect people – from COVID-19 to bird flu, preventing pandemics requires protecting all species

When the World Health Organization declared COVID-19 a pandemic on March 11, 2020, humans were the only species with reported cases of the disease. Although early genetic analyses pointed to horseshoe bats as the evolutionary hosts of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, no reports had yet surfaced suggesting it could be transmitted from humans to other species.

Less than two weeks later, a report from Belgium marked the first infection in a domestic cat-presumably by its owner. In the summer of 2020, there were news of COVID-19 outbreaks and subsequent culls on mink farms across Europe, and fears of ...