- By Annabelle Liang
- Business press reporter
Hong Kong is set to raise its year-long restriction on the import of hamsters later on this month as it loosens up a few of the world’s hardest Covid limitations.
The city’s Farming, Fisheries and Preservation Department (AFCD) informed the BBC the rodents would be evaluated for the infection.
In 2015 authorities said around 2,000 animals would be chosen to stop the spread of Covid.
The relocation followed a break out of infections at an animal shop.
A representative for the AFCD said it prepared to raise the import restriction in mid-January.
“Our staff will organize to gather samples from hamsters and other little mammals for Covid-19 screening. They can just be offered if the test outcomes are unfavorable,” the representative said.
They included that this was since research studies had actually discovered the animals might contract the infection and pass it to human beings.
“If such imports are to resume the hamsters require to be managed with factor to consider [and] offered the very best care possible throughout transportation and quarantine,” a representative from the Society for the Avoidance of Ruthlessness to Animals in Hong Kong said.
Rodent row
It triggered authorities to test numerous animals in the shop for coronavirus. Eleven hamsters that had actually been imported from the Netherlands evaluated favorable.
Authorities said they thought this might have been a case of animal-to-human Covid transmission, and said around 2,000 hamsters and other little animals would be chosen as a “preventative step”.
At the time countless individuals signed a petition versus the choice to put down the animals.
“Subsequent screening of human beings and hamsters verified that there was transmission of Covid-19 from hamsters to human beings,” Vanessa Barrs, a teacher of buddy animal health at the City University of Hong Kong, informed the BBC.
“The circumstance was extremely sad, however the federal government acted out of an abundance of care at that time,” she included.
The infection that triggers Covid, Sars-Cov-2, can be captured by animals consisting of dogs, cats and hamsters, which are all typically kept as family pets. However there is no clear proof that family pets can quickly pass the infection to human beings.
Louis Yeung, owner of the Chinchilla & Pets Shop in Hong Kong, said he had handed over 22 hamsters to be culled by the authorities last year.
He told the BBC that he hopes to start selling the family pets again once import restrictions are lifted.
“Since January 2022, our business has been bad. The hamsters are popular pets to lots of people, especially children,” he said.
People arriving in the city, which is a special administrative region of China, no longer have to do mandatory PCR tests.
A vaccine pass system was also scrapped, although people were still required to wear masks in public places.
It was a dramatic move by the city, which once had actually some of the most stringent Covid-19 restrictions in the world.