Rats, whose populations in cities exploded during the pandemic, have now joined the list of wildlife believed to be capable of catching and transmitting the virus that causes COVID-19, new research finds.
In a study published Thursday in the journal mBio, researchers showed that rats — like dogs, cats, hamsters, ferrets and humans' other close cohabitants — can pick up the pandemic virus from their environment.
They don't appear to get very sick; none of the wild rats deliberately infected in a lab lost weight or died as a result. But when the rats were exposed to the alpha, delta and omicron variants of the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus, researchers found evidence of robust viral replication in the animals' noses, mouths, throats and lungs.
