A North Carolina family in which multiple members tested positive for the coronavirus found out their dog also contracted the virus.
The McLean family was involved in a study at Duke University during which the mother, father, and son tested positive for COVID-19, while the daughter did not. The family also opted to have their two dogs and cat tested for the virus, while their fourth pet, a lizard, did not get tested.
One of the family’s dogs, a pug named Winston, tested positive for the virus, according to WRAL. The principal investigator of the Duke study, Dr. Chris Woods, said that he believes Winston is the first known positive case in a dog in the United States.
“Pugs are a little unusual in that they cough and sneeze in a very strange way,” Heather McLean, the family’s matriarch and a pediatrician at Duke, explained. “So it almost seems like he was gagging, and there was one day when he didn’t want to eat his breakfast, and if you know pugs, you know they love to eat, so that seemed very unusual.”
“[The dog] licks all of our dinner plates and sleeps in my mom’s bed, and we’re the ones who put our faces into his face. So, it makes sense that he got [coronavirus],” her son Ben added.
The family said that Winston was only sick for a short period of time.
Last month, a tiger at the Bronx Zoo, Nadia, tested positive for COVID-19 in what is believed to be the first known infection of an animal in the United States. The first two cats in the country tested positive for the virus last week.
