Prognosis
Hong Kong to Cull Over 1,000 Hamsters After Delta Flare
- Two human cases tied to a pet shop selling imported hamsters
- Thousands of hamsters to be culled, shop visitors quarantined
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Hong Kong, suspecting that imported hamsters may have spread Covid-19 to humans, ordered the culling of thousands of the small mammals, closed shops selling them and sent more than 100 pet shop visitors into quarantine camp as part of its increasingly fervent quest to eliminate the virus.
The escalation came after nearly a dozen hamsters imported from the Netherlands and sold at a local pet store called Little Boss were found to be infected with delta, a virulent Covid-19 variant that hadn’t been detected in the city for months until a worker there tested positive. Samples from the shop’s warehouse in another part of the city also showed traces of the virus.