“Our findings demonstrate that under experimental conditions, cattle show low susceptibility to SARS-CoV-2 infection.”.
The wide distribution of BCoV is of special interest, especially because the presence of a pre-existing coronavirus did not protect from infection with another betacoronavirus in this study. Double infections of individual animals might lead to recombination events between SARS-CoV-2 and BCoV, a phenomenon already described for other pandemic coronaviruses. A resulting chimeric virus, comprising characteristics of both viruses, could threaten human and livestock populations and should therefore be monitored.”
