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. 2022 Oct 7;167(12):2503–2517. doi: 10.1007/s00705-022-05609-1

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© The Author(s) 2022

Open AccessThis article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.

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Fig. 1 — SARS-CoV-2 transmission among different animals. The most widely accepted hypothesis is that SARS-CoV-2 was derived from a bat coronavirus after a modification in a putative intermediate host, where it acquired the capability to infect humans. The wide circulation of the virus among humans caused a pandemic, and it is plausible that infected humans may have transmitted the virus to different animal species. In order to better understand the role of animals in the epidemiology of SARS-CoV-2 and to establish appropriate animal models, several species have been experimentally infected, but not all of them were found to be permissive for the infection. To date, only minks seem to be able to transmit SARS-CoV-2 infection to humans. Greater attention should be devoted to monitoring new variants of SARS-CoV-2 because of their potential to acquire the ability to infect domestic or wild animals, which could potentially serve as reservoirs for the virus.