Files
Abstract
Near the end of December 2019, cases of pneumonia with unknown cause were being reported to the World Health Organization (WHO) in Wuhan, China. Months later, the world went into lockdown due to a coronavirus outbreak more paralyzing than the 2002 Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus (SARS-CoV) and 2012 Middle East Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus (MERS-CoV) outbreaks. The cause of this recent and ongoing pandemic is a virus named SARS-CoV-2 and it has raised the concern for species-jump due to cases of reverse zoonotic infection and arising variants. Many counties have performed serosurveillance studies to uncover which animals are susceptible to SARS-CoV-2 infections and the possibility of animal-to-human spread. In this study, we assess the seropositivity rate of client owned cats in Athens, Georgia that have been infected with SARS-CoV-2 through testing samples collected by the Veterinary Teaching Hospital of the University of Georgia between May 2020 and August 2021. We utilize recombinant Spike and Receptor Binding Domain (RBD) as capture antigens for ELISAs, and analyze our data using Normalized Absorbance Ratio (NAR). Our results show that out of the 335 samples received and tested, 4 samples (1.2%) were believed to be true SARS-CoV-2 reactive.