English: A conceptual diagram displaying the transmission of severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) among humans and various animal hosts. (A) Horseshoe bats (Rhinolophus affinis) are the most likely animal reservoir and ancestral hosts of the SARS-like CoV that gave rise to SARS-CoV-2 [53,105]. (B) A multitude of animals including mammals, birds, and reptiles have been proposed as potential intermediate hosts [38,39,41]. (C) SARS-CoV-2 was first reported in humans in December 2019 in Wuhan, China [106]. (D) Successful laboratory infections of SARS-CoV-2 have been reported in the following mammals: domestic dogs, domestic cats, ferrets, rabbits, raccoon dogs, hamsters, mice, tree shrews, cattle, and several species of non-human primates [107,108]. (E) In January 2020, the World Health Organization (WHO) first reported that human-to-human transmission of SARS-CoV-2 is feasible [109,110]. (F) Natural infections of SARS-CoV-2 in animals transmitted from humans (i.e., reverse zoonosis or anthroponosis) have been detected in domestic dogs and cats, domestic mink, ferrets, mice, hamsters, captive gorillas, and captive large cats (e.g., tigers and lions) [111,112]. (G) Evidence of SARS-CoV-2 spillback from domestic minks to humans and intraspecies transmission of SARS-CoV-2 among minks has been detected [46,47]. At this time these are the described transmission pathways and animals.