Coronavirus

What's The Risk Of Getting COVID-19 From Mosquitoes?

In our series "What's the Risk?", experts weigh in on what risks different scenarios pose of transmitting COVID-19.

What's The Risk Of Getting COVID-19 From Mosquitoes?
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When it comes to getting sick with COVID-19, you might be thinking about this, and we have too. Croft McCreedy emailed asking: “Can someone get COVID-19 from mosquitoes?”

We asked the experts: Dr. Irfan N. Hafiz, an infectious disease physician and chief medical officer for Northwestern Medicine's northwest region; Katie Cary, vice president of infection prevention for HCA Continental Division; and Dr. Jasmine Marcelin, an infectious disease specialist at Nebraska Medicine.

Their take: There's only a low risk of contracting COVID-19 from mosquitoes.

"No, it cannot be spread by mosquitoes. And there actually has been some studies done on this saying that it will not be spread by mosquitoes. It's a respiratory virus," Cary said.

"COVID-19 is spread by droplets and so it requires a person to cough, speak, sneeze, and then somebody else to get those droplets onto their mucous membranes, so anywhere on their face," Marcelin said.

"They really are not adapted to existing and multiplying in an organism such as a mosquito. They're cold-blooded, so it's very hard for them to be able to proliferate and actually survive there, unless they're actually genetically adapted to do that, which really COVID is not," Hafiz said.

If you have a question about your risk, send us a video at whatstherisk@newsy.com. You can see answers to other questions here