Abstract
The current COVID-19 pandemic has created unmeasurable damages to society at a global level, from the irreplaceable loss of life, to the massive economic losses. In addition, the disease threatens further biodiversity loss. Due to their shared physiology with humans, primates, and particularly great apes, are susceptible to the disease. However, it is still uncertain how their populations would respond in case of infection. Here, we combine stochastic population and epidemiological models to simulate the range of potential effects of COVID-19 on the probability of extinction of mountain gorillas. We find that extinction is sharply driven by increases in the basic reproductive number and that the probability of extinction is greatly exacerbated if the immunity lasts less than 6 months. These results stress the need to limit exposure of the mountain gorilla population, the park personnel and visitors, as well as the potential of vaccination campaigns to extend the immunity duration.
Highlights
The current COVID-19 pandemic has created unmeasurable damages to society at a global level, from the irreplaceable loss of life, to the massive economic losses
Because there are no known outbreaks of COVID-19 among populations of mountain gorillas, we used published information on the pandemic among humans for four epidemiological variables, namely (a) the basic reproductive number (R0)[34,35], (b) the infection fatality rate (IFR)[24,25,36,37], (c) the probability of developing immunity and (d) the duration of immunity[37,38,39,40,41]
In the case of a potential outbreak of COVID-19 in the Karisoke mountain gorilla subpopulation, our simulations provided key insights into the influence of several of the epidemiological variables associated to the disease
Summary
The current COVID-19 pandemic has created unmeasurable damages to society at a global level, from the irreplaceable loss of life, to the massive economic losses. Severe respiratory disease outbreaks among chimpanzees in Côte d’Ivoire, Uganda and Tanzania, and mountain gorillas (Gorilla beringei) in Rwanda have been linked to human-born v iruses[10,11,12,13], while polio-like outbreaks of likely human origin have been recorded within chimpanzee populations in Tanzania and the Democratic Republic of the Congo[14]. This potential risk of transmission from humans to wildlife makes emergent diseases such as COVID-19 specially alarming due to the lack of knowledge of their short- and long-term impact on wild ape populations. The virus can be spread by Scientific Reports | (2021) 11:20715
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