Tiger in US zoo tests positive for coronavirus, becomes first animal to get COVID-19

The first animal started showing symptoms March 27, and all are doing well and expected to recover, said the zoo, which has been closed to the public since March 16 amid the surging coronavirus outbreak in New York.

A tiger at the Bronx Zoo has tested positive for the new coronavirus, in what is believed to be the first known infection in an animal in the U.S. or a tiger anywhere, federal officials and the zoo said Sunday.

The 4-year-old Malayan tiger named Nadia — and six other tigers and lions that have also fallen ill — are believed to have been infected by a zoo employee who wasn’t yet showing symptoms, the zoo said. The first animal started showing symptoms March 27, and all are doing well and expected to recover, said the zoo, which has been closed to the public since March 16 amid the surging coronavirus outbreak in New York.

The test result stunned zoo officials: “I couldn’t believe it,” director Jim Breheny said. But he hopes the finding can contribute to the global fight against the virus that causes COVID-19.

“Any kind of knowledge that we get on how it’s transmitted, how different species react to it, that knowledge somehow is going to provide a greater base resource for people,” he said in an interview.

The finding raises new questions about transmission of the virus in animals. The U.S. Department of Agriculture, which confirmed Nadia’s test result at its veterinary lab, said there are no known cases of the virus in U.S. pets or livestock.

“There doesn’t appear to be, at this time, any evidence that suggests that the animals can spread the virus to people or that they can be a source of the infection in the United States,” Dr. Jane Rooney, a veterinarian and a USDA official, said in an interview.

The USDA said Sunday it’s not recommending routine coronavirus testing of animals, in zoos or elsewhere, or of zoo employees. Still, Rooney said a small number of animals in the U.S. have been tested through the USDA’s National Veterinary Services Laboratories, and all those tests came back negative except Nadia’s.

The coronavirus outbreaks around the world are driven by person-to-person transmission, experts say.

There have been a handful of reports outside the U.S. of pet dogs or cats becoming infected after close contact with contagious people, including a Hong Kong dog that tested positive for a low level of the pathogen in February and early March. Hong Kong agriculture authorities concluded that pet dogs and cats couldn’t pass the virus to human beings but could test positive if exposed by their owners.

Some researchers have been trying to understand the susceptibility of different animal species to the virus, and to determine how it spreads among animals, according to the Paris-based World Organization for Ani

Symptoms of covid 19

 Pbe sick with the virus for 1 to 14 days before developing symptoms. The most common symptoms of coronavirus disease (COVID-19) are fever, tiredness, and dry cough. Most people (about 80%) recover from the disease without needing special treatment.

More rarely, the disease can be serious and even fatal. Older people, and people with other medical conditions (such as asthma, diabetes, or heart disease), may be more vulnerable to becoming severely ill.

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People may experience:

cough

fever

tiredness

difficulty breathing (severe cases

There’s currently no vaccine to prevent coronavirus disease (COVID-19).

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You can protect yourself and help prevent spreading the virus to others if you:

Do

Wash your hands regularly for 20 seconds, with soap and water or alcohol-based hand rub

Cover your nose and mouth with a disposable tissue or flexed elbow when you cough or sneeze

Avoid close contact (1 meter or 3 feet) with people who are unwell

Stay home and self-isolate from others in the household if you feel unwell

Don't

Touch your eyes, nose, or mouth if your hands are not clean

Molecular Weight, Molecular Mass, and TheirCorrect Units.

There are two common (and equivalent) ways to de￾scribe molecular mass; both are used in this text.
 Thef is molecular weight, or relative molecular mass,
denoted Mr. The molecular weight of a substance is de￾fined as the ratio of the mass of a molecule of that sub￾stance to one-twelfth the mass of carbon-12 (12C).
Since Mr is a ratio, it is dimensionless—it has no asso￾ciated units. The second is molecular mass, denoted
m. This is simply the mass of one molecule, or the mo￾lar mass divided by Avogadro’s number. The molecu￾lar mass, m, is expressed in daltons (abbreviated Da).
One dalton is equivalent to one-twelfth the mass of
carbon-12; a kilodalton (kDa) is 1,000 daltons; a mega￾dalton (MDa) is 1 million daltons.
Consider, for example, a molecule with a mass
1,000 times that of water. We can say of this molecule
either Mr  18,000 or m  18,000 daltons. We can also
describe it as an “18 kDa molecule.” However, the ex￾pression Mr  18,000 daltons is incorrect.
Another convenient unit for describing the mass
of a single atom or molecule is the atomic mass unit
(formerly amu, now commonly denoted u). One
atomic mass unit (1 u) is defined as one-twelfth the
mass of an atom of carbon-12. Since the experimen￾tally measured mass of an atom of carbon-12 is
1.9926  10 23 g, 1 u  1.6606  10 24 g. The atomic
mass unit is convenient for describing the mass of a
peak observed by mass spectrometry (see