Although hamsters are some of the cutest animals out there, you might want to keep a distance from some of them if you don’t want to get infected with COVID, as new data suggests. There have been a total of over 399.6 million infections with COVID worldwide since the pandemic began, according to worldometers.info.
The idea that we could get COVID from a hamster is revealed by a new article published by The Guardian, as new research confirms that hamsters represent the likely source of a recent COVID outbreak in Hong Kong.
A minimum of 50 people were infected in the outbreak
A pet shop was to blame for the recent COVID outbreak in Hong Kong. A minimum of 50 people got infected, and more than 2,200 hamsters were slaughtered.
However, the virologists said that it’s unlikely for a pet owner to get infected with the coronavirus from his own pet hamster. Therefore, these pet animals shouldn’t be harmed.
The outbreak was of the Delta variant of the coronavirus. This could be surprising considering that Omicron is currently much more prevalent across the world.
However, there’s another COVID variant out there that spreads even faster than Omicron. It’s known as the BA.2 variant, and it’s 1.5 times more contagious than Omicron. Actually, BA.2 is a subvariant of Omicron. While the latter is known also as the BA.1 variant, there’s no wonder why the former also goes by the name BA.2.
While it’s almost impossible to predict how the ongoing pandemic will end, there are multiple theories. Back in January, scientists warned the world that even more worrisome COVID variants will come after Omicron’s dominance will end.
Leonardo Martinez, a Boston University infectious disease epidemiologist, brings a simple explanation, as quoted by AP News:
The faster omicron spreads, the more opportunities there are for mutation, potentially leading to more variants.
