It sounds like the title of a (bad) Disney film but hamster vigilantes are both real and tragic. Having discovered that some hamsters imported from the Netherlands in late December were infected with SARS-CoV-2, Hong Kong ordered a cull of the animals. Thousands of heartbroken owners have refused to surrender their pets and collaborated with sympathisers to form an underground network whereby their hamsters can be hidden from snooping government officials. It is a very sad situation.
I would like, more than anything, to be done with this pandemic but given the behaviour of this virus I just do not think it is going to recede quietly into the background… because of the hamsters. I should clarify that it is not the infected hamsters that I specifically view as the problem but the fact that this virus seems so remarkably good at migrating into other species. This is not mere speculation. Using modelling technology, a team of zoonotic disease experts led by Barbara Han at Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies in New York looked at the receptor that the virus likes to bind to in people and found that hundreds of different mammals species are vulnerable to it.
Her work confirms what we knew about cats and mink. These animals can easily catch the disease, harbour it in their populations and then transmit it to others. It also confirms that dogs can catch it . Yet, the research shows that raccoon dogs, white lipped peccaries and skia deer (which are all apparently farmed) have traits that make them very likely to function like cats and mink when they get exposed to SARS-CoV-2. This was particularly true for water buffalo which are widely kept for dairy and ploughing in Asia and had the highest zoonotic capacity for the virus among livestock that were studied. Among hunted species, the duiker, the warty pig and two deer species were identified as threats. These findings too are backed up by the recent observation that the virus is circulating widely in North American deer populations.
It is all rather dire news because once the virus migrates into a new species it faces an entirely new set of challenges presented by that species’ unique immune system that will drive it to evolve in unexpected ways. That alone is bad but where things get particularly nightmarish is when the newly evolved virus then leaps back into people and is suddenly found to be evading the vaccines that we have worked so hard to create. You can read more in The Economist articles that I have written on this here and here.