From ferrets to mice and marmosets, labs scramble to find right animals for coronavirus studies

One lab is digging into its freezer to thaw out the archived sperm of SARS-susceptible mice. Another is anesthetizing ferrets so they don’t sneeze when the new coronavirus is squirted into their nostrils. Yet others are racing to infect macaques, marmosets, and African green monkeys.

Those animals could prove critical for understanding how Covid-19 works — and for concocting vaccines and treatments to stop its sweep. Every day, it seems another company announces an attempt to make its own virus-fighting vials. But to test an experimental formulation, scientists can’t just jump from Petri dishes into people. They need to try it in critters first, to check that the stuff is safe and effective.

Now, researchers are rushing to figure out which creatures work best, a task that could take months. “We’re at the ‘Uh oh, it’s complicated’ stage,” said Lisa Gralinski, a microbiologist and assistant professor of epidemiology who studies coronaviruses at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

The trouble is, labs can’t just use whatever animal they have lying around to start