Microbiologists have just made a startling discovery about NYC rats
The COVID-19 pandemic, while horrible for most people, was the New York rat’s moment in the sun. With pesky foot traffic locked away in houses, then a glut of food crumbs from the move to outdoor dining, the rodents danced—in park grasses, trash alleys, and even out to the typically treacherous streets, where the risk of being flattened by a car had effectively vanished. The taste of freedom was (probably) intoxicating, and the city was quickly overrun.
But as it turns out, COVID-19 might have been a double-edged sword for rats, one they’re now about to fall upon. A new study, published in the journal of the American Society for Microbiology, reports that “wild rats in the New York municipal sewer systems” can catch SARS-CoV-2, including the dominant strains: alpha, delta, and omicron.
“Our findings highlight the need for further monitoring of SARS-CoV-2 in rat populations to determine if the virus is circulating in the animals and evolving into new strains that could pose a risk to humans,” Henry Wan, a professor of infectious diseases and lead investigator for the study, said in a statement. “Overall, our work in this space shows that animals can play a role in pandemics that impacts humans, and it’s important that we continue to increase our understanding so we can protect both human and animal health.”
In two trapping efforts in September and November of 2021, federal health inspectors worked with the city’s department of parks and recreation to snatch up 79 Norway rats (the fat brown species) from spots near Brooklyn wastewaters. Thirteen of them tested positive for COVID-19 infection.
It’s the first time rats with COVID-19 have been recorded on this isle of American soil (previously, some were found in Hong Kong and Belgium). That’s a troubling discovery, because New York has approximately 8 million wild rats—which is also approximately the same number of humans who live across the city’s five boroughs. And after scampering unchecked for so long, now three years after COVID-19 shutdowns, the rats won’t go back in their holes. Don’t they know their place?
Yes—along with growing fatter, New York rats have also grown too big for their britches. From 2021 to 2022, city health inspector data showed rat sightings doubled. And on the ground, their unprecedented boldness is even more visceral. City residents complained on social media of having to employ vigilante hunting dogs as a last resort, or “renting” cats for their apartments.
East meets pest
The rat problem has become a hot-button issue in local politics: Mayor Eric Adams spent much of his 2021 campaign trail assuring New Yorkers that he would “fight crime, fight inequality, fight rats,” and that “rats don’t run this city”—but now in office, he has to answer for the continued scourge.
Seeming desperate, city government paid top consulting firm McKinsey $4 million in October to scheme up a solution for cleaning the heaps of garbage that line city streets, offering rats an always open, all-you-can-eat buffet. (The rat problem is, of course, inextricably linked to New York’s age-old garbage problem—meaning, perhaps, that McKinsey is doomed from the start.) In November, the city posted a job opening for a so-called “rat czar,” who was required to have a “killer instinct” and “swashbuckling attitude.”
Like a failed pied piper, Adams has rolled out six anti-rat or rat-proofing efforts in a short year, with a few focused on curbing trash piles. “You’re tired of the rodents, you’re tired of the smell, you’re tired of seeing food, waste and spillage,” he said at a Times Square conference last spring.
Despite reportedly keeping a rat as a childhood pet, Adams has an obvious bloodlust: In 2019, as Brooklyn borough president, he infamously promoted a new rat trap by scooping rat corpses out of a vat of poisonous chemicals, where they’d been bated by Oreo cookies and sunflower seeds. It’s almost sad. Maybe a kinder, rodent COVID-19 pandemic could do the trick instead?
Then again, rats once survived the Black Plague . . . so we wouldn’t count them out.
“There are millions out there,” Pat Marino, who leases the Adams-approved rat death traps, told Gothamist in May. “I don’t want to be an alarmist, but there are a lot.”
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