Oral Sampling of Little Brown Bat ) Maternity Colonies for SARS-CoV-2 in the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic, USA.

The potential introduction of SARS-CoV-2, the virus responsible for the COVID-19 pandemic, into North American bat populations is of interest to wildlife managers due to recent disease-mediated declines of several species. Populations of little brown bats () have collapsed due to white-nose syndrome (WNS), a disease caused by the introduction and spread of the fungal pathogen (). Throughout much of the United States and southern Canada, large colonies of the species routinely established diurnal roosts in anthropogenic structures, thereby creating the potential for direct human contact and cross-species disease transmission.