The data

With the number of cases steadily rising day by day, COVID-19 has been pretty much in the headlines of every newspaper known to man. Despite the massive amount of attention, a topic that has remained mostly untouched (some exceptions being the reports of farm and domestic animals getting infected) by the mainstream media is how animals are hit by the disease too. To cite the information provided by the government of Canada¹ “There is currently limited information on animals and COVID-19, especially on whether an animal can spread the virus if they become infected. “

There have been admirable efforts by the scientific community to understand how the virus develops, both in animal and human hosts and the research about it grows by the day. Open data regarding animal infections is, however, not so easy to find.

To that effect, the World Organisation for Animal Health frequently publishes a report of new cases in animals around the world at this page². However, compiling information from this source is hard work, and not everyone is willing/has the time to extract the data from each statement and make a dataset out of them. One of the few sources of data open to the public is the one in the United States Department of Agriculture website³. The table lists cases of SAR-CoV-2 (the virus that causes COVID-19 in humans) in animals that have been confirmed by the United States Department of Agriculture’s National Veterinary Services Laboratories. Though in each case, only the first animal of a species reported in a facility or home makes it to the table, and it is, therefore, a rough estimate of how many animals have the virus in the US.

Despite its small size (around 30 data points) For each case, the table notes the type of animal infected, where and when it got infected, the method used to detect the virus and whether or not it was in contact with a human infected. The table is not available to download, but it is easy enough to either copy or scrape if you want it. To make things more interesting, I decided to scrap it instead of copying it into an Excel file using the following code:

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