US's first dog positive for coronavirus dies

Buddy, the seven-year-old German shepherd, is the first dog to test positive for the coronavirus in the United States. 

Photo credit: nationalgeographic.com

National Geographic magazine reported, he has died after struggling with symptoms that may be familiar to many of the virus's human sufferers.

The dog became sick in mid-April, right before the dog's seventh birthday, Buddy began struggling to breathe and his condition only worsened over the following weeks and months.

Six weeks later, he became the first dog in the United States to be confirmed positive for SARS-CoV-2, the coronavirus that causes COVID-19. On July 11, Buddy died.

Mahoney and his wife Allison, who live in New York, euthanized the dog on July 11 after Buddy began vomiting blood clots, urinating blood and was unable to walk.

"Without a shadow of a doubt, I thought (Buddy) was positive," Mahoney said, but many vets in their area were closed because of the pandemic.

Some of them were skeptical about pets contracting the virus at all. And most testing supplies were being conserved for human use anyway.

A clinic was finally able to confirm that Buddy was positive, and found that the family's 10-month-old puppy -- who was never sick -- had virus antibodies.

Medical records provided by the Mahoneys and reviewed for National Geographic by two veterinarians who were not involved in his treatment indicate that Buddy likely had lymphoma, a type of cancer, which would explain the symptoms he suffered just before his death. The Mahoneys didn’t learn that lymphoma was being considered as the probable cause of his symptoms until the day of his death, they say, when additional blood work results confirmed it. It’s unclear whether cancer made him more susceptible to contracting the coronavirus, or if the virus made him ill, or if it was just a case of coincidental timing. Buddy’s family, like thousands of families grappling with the effects of the coronavirus around the world, is left with many questions and few answers.

Buddy's vets later discovered the dog was likely also suffering from lymphoma, raising the question of whether animals -- like humans -- with pre-existing conditions might also be more susceptible to serious illness from the new coronavirus.

Neither public health officials nor veterinarians could offer the family much information, they told National Geographic, because there was not enough data about the virus in animals, beyond the fact that infection appeared to be rare.

"We had zero knowledge or experience with the scientific basis of COVID in dogs," Robert Cohen, the vet who tested Buddy, told the magazine.

And it seemed to them that neither city nor federal health authorities were very interested in learning from Buddy's case. By the time they decided to do a necropsy, Buddy had already been cremated.

The official word from the World Health Organization is that pets likely do not often transmit the virus to their owners.

But Shelley Rankin, a veterinarian at the University of Pennsylvania, said more study is necessary.

"If we're telling the world that prevalence (of animal cases) is low, then we have to look at high numbers" of animals, she said.

Twelve dogs and 10 cats have tested positive for coronavirus in the US, according to National Geographic.