DRC's mountain gorillas enter lockdown over fears coronavirus could wipe out population
A park ranger wearing a protective mask in the Virunga National Park. Peter Yeung
“Keep your distance!” whispered Benoit Ishiba, as a 200-kilogram silverback mountain gorilla leisurely strode past through a sprawling cloud rainforest. “It’s for his safety as much as it is for yours.”
Following behind came a mother with a black-haired baby clinging to her. The pair, who belong to a family of 24 gorillas in the Democratic Republic of Congo’s Virunga National Park, scoped out a patch to sit down and began snacking on some green vegetation.
“This will be the last visit for a long time,” said Ishiba, a guide who has been working in the park since 2014. “We cannot risk the gorillas catching the disease from tourists.”
Park authorities last month announced that all visits to Virunga would be suspended until June, after advice from scientific experts that the endangered mountain gorillas would likely be susceptible to coronavirus. The park closed on the same afternoon The National visited, March 24.
Confirmed cases of the respiratory virus have risen sharply in the central African state – it now has 161 cases and 18 deaths – since the first positive test was recorded on March 10, but the Covid-19 pandemic has since reached North Kivu, the province in which Virunga National Park is based.
“We don’t know how pathogenic the virus could be in the gorillas, but there is a risk it could be very serious,” said Fabian Leendertz, a world-renowned expert on primate diseases and head of the Leendertz Lab in Berlin.
“These great apes are our closest living relatives and there is evidence that the transmission of even mild human pathogens to apes can have severe consequences.”
https://www.thenational.ae/world/africa/drc-s-mountain-gorillas-enter-lockdown-over-fears-coronavirus-could-wipe-out-population-1.1002720
You can't get them to do social distancing...
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