Maybe I'm missing it, but I don't see anything in here about non-human transmission. We know cats, dogs, hamsters, guinea pigs, mink, and gorillas can all get it. Ok, if you have a gorilla in your attic you probably have worse problems than infection, but with this many mammalian species already confirmed, it seems implausible to me that mice, squirrels, raccoons, possums, coyotes, foxes, and other common urban mammals are not spreading it.
I doubt animal transmission is a significant driver. Most animals remain outdoors and socially distanced from humans. Exceptions of course include farm workers, zookeepers, etc. But they’re a tiny percent of the population.
There was a famous outlier in Denmark, where a new mutation developed among farmed mink, and the government crushed it by killing all the farmed mink in the country.
The raccoon, or mouse, in your sick neighbor's attic last night, who goes into your attic tonight...
The mink are the only ones we _know_ transmitted it. But I don't think we've looked much.
Dogs, for one, do _not_ do social distancing.
Plus, since we learned it aerosolizes more than was initially thought, the animal that walked through your airspace 15 minutes before can share lungspace with you. They don't have to get that close to you, especially at night when the windspeed is low.
> "Plus, since we learned it aerosolizes more than was initially thought, the animal that walked through your airspace 15 minutes before can share lungspace with you. They don't have to get that close to you, especially at night when the windspeed is low."
such an infection would require the virus to hit a number of very low probability events in a row, like simply surviving outside the body for 15 minutes and a coordinated beelining of millions of particles into your lungs rather than dispersing out to the many orders of magnitude of space everywhere else around it. needless to say, it's quite unlikely, like less than lightning strike unlikely. as a society, we badly need to improve our ability to comparatively assess (and respond to) risk.
Don't confuse common coronavirus in animals with Covid-19. My cats both have coronavirus, as many cats do, and will test positive for the test of their life. They don't, however, have Covid-19. They likely acquired it as shelter kittens many years ago.
