Nadia is a four-year old Malayan tiger currently living at the Bronx Zoo in New York. She lives with her sister Azul, two Amur tigers, and three African lions. After all these big cats developed dry coughs, they had multiple tests. Eventually it came to be that Nadia is infected with Covid-19. However, let’s not worry about this as there is still more to know about these big cats.
Firstly, Nadia and the other cats began to develop a dry cough and were losing their appetite. Of course zookeepers decided to have a variety of tests done on Nadia specifically.
The reason why Nadia is the only one who went for the tests is because there is a level of risk with testing. Therefore, having to sedate and put all seven cats under anaesthesia is too much of a risk.
There are reports prior to this that household pets such as dogs and cats were testing positive. However, WHO concluded that there are no cases where household pets can be infected with the virus or spread it to their owners.
This means that while the virus is present on them (which explains the positive results), they are not actually infected.
However, Nadia and her housemates seem to be the very first suspected case of a human passing the virus to an animal. At least that seems to be suspected reason that Nadia and the other cats are infected.
It is the belief of the zoo that an asymptomatic zookeeper passed the virus to them. Just to clarify, an asymptomatic case is when a person is infected with the virus but shows no symptoms.
After receiving treatment in the form of antibiotics, zookeepers expect all the cats to make a full recovery.
