Day 127: Neovisicide

PlagueBlog is saddened to have correctly predicted the planned slaughter of no-longer-particularly-sick mink (Neovison vison) in the Netherlands, due to their suspected ability to transmit coronavirus back to humans, as well as pure speculation that they may turn into an animal reserve for the virus (which hardly seems to need one with humans keeping it going). The Guardian reports that the unnecessary and paranoid gassing of mink mothers and their new pups has already begun. The Guardian misreports that the mink were initially infected by the farmers. In fact, the source of infection doesn't seem to have been humans; it may have been farm cats. (PlagueBlog hopes they won't also be gassed.)

Elsewhere on the animal front, the South China Morning Post reports that man's best friend can detect coronavirus infections. French researchers trained eight Belgian Malinois shepherd dogs to sniff out the infected from their armpit sweat. (No dogs were endangered in the course of this experiment.) They even found two asymptomatic cases in the control sweat samples; the corresponding humans were retested and found to be positive.

Cases are up only 0.56% in Massachusetts; to celebrate the governor is letting restaurants open for outside dining on Monday, though the state's tangle of pandemic web pages don't seem to include any confirmation of that yet.