| Transgenic mouse (Bao et al., 2020a; Bao et al., 2020b; Jiang et al., 2020; Sun et al., 2020b) |
Moderate interstitial pneumonia; infiltration of inflammatory cells; weight loss; immune factors can be detected |
Drug screening and vaccine evaluation. |
Expressing hACE2; susceptible to SARS-CoV-2. |
High cost; long breeding time; development of few cases with severe symptoms or death. |
| Non-transgenic mouse (Israelow et al., 2020; Rathnasinghe et al., 2020; Sun et al., 2020a) |
Inflammatory response develops in lungs; weight loss; immune factors can be detected. |
Drug screening and vaccine evaluation |
Simple to construct; easy to repeat; suitable for widespread popularization |
High cost; few subjects develop severe symptoms or death |
| Hamster (Chan et al., 2020; Imai et al., 2020; Sia et al., 2020) |
Weight loss; severe lung injury, including severe, bilateral, peripheral, multi-lobular ground glass opacity and lung consolidation. |
Study of infection and transmission routes. |
Low cost; susceptible to SARS-CoV-2; symptoms and manifestations are very similar to that in human infection |
Few subjects develop severe symptoms or death |
| Ferret (Kim et al., 2020; Pulit-Penaloza et al., 2022; Ryan et al., 2021) |
Acute bronchiolitis in lungs; obvious virus replication; rise in temperature. |
Drug screening, vaccine evaluation, and study of immune responses |
Anatomical structure of upper and lower respiratory tracts of ferrets is very similar to that of humans; susceptible to SARS-CoV-2 |
Showing mild clinical symptoms; virus titer in lungs is relatively low |
| NHPs (Rockx et al., 2020; Shan et al., 2020; Song et al., 2020; Wang et al., 2020b; Yu et al., 2020) |
Typical interstitial pneumonia; diffuse alveolar damage; immune factors can be detected |
Drug screening and vaccine evaluation. |
Very close genetic relationship with humans, with similar anatomy, physiology, and pathology |
High cost; difficult operation; small number of subjects. |
