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A study in China has revealed that cats are capable of transmitting the coronavirus.
This comes a week after a case in which a Belgian woman from Liege City in the french speaking part of the country, was found to have passed on the disease to her pet cat.
According to Daily Mail, vets found the infection on her pet a week after the woman had come down with the illness.
The study which was however undertaken by researchers at the Harbin Veterinary Research Institute in China, concluded that cats are highly vulnerable to the virus.
The lab discovered that the animals can transmit the disease to other cats through respiratory droplets after it undertook experiments on a small number of them.
The study is yet to be peer-reviewed, a scientific process of evaluation to determine the credibility of the research.
The study was done by administering a few cats with a high dosage of the disease. Cats which were not infected were then placed in adjacent cages to those which were infected.
They were not able to touch but were close enough that they also caught the disease, leading to the conclusion that it can spread between the animals through repository droplets. This process was repeated with another group.
The findings did not prove that the disease can be spread from cats to humans but virologists and infectious disease experts warned that people with cats should be extra cautious and remember the importance of washing their hands.
The global confirmed cases of COVID-19 has reached 1 million, with over 52,000 deaths.
