COVID-19 disaster management plans for two laboratory animal facilities in South Africa

Abstract

Policies and guidelines are available for acute disasters such as earthquakes, fire and floods, however, little is available on how laboratory animal facilities should mitigate subacute disasters like the COVID-19 pandemic that imposed major restrictions on the free movement of people. As such, laboratory animal facilities had to find plausible mitigating measures to safeguard the welfare of animals in their care, to prevent animal suffering if staff could not reach the animals, albeit with limited time. The simplest approach was to stop active experiments and halt animal breeding, or to euthanize all animals. Challenges with such methods included the ethical debate regarding euthanasia of animals at the start of a pandemic and the need to perform a harm–benefit analysis while drafting the disaster plans, termination of studies at advanced stages with information loss or killing of genetically modified strains that would be difficult to replace. Two research animal facilities in South Africa addressed these challenges by implementing several changes such as allowing only essential studies to continue, maintaining small breeding colonies for essential strains, and providing staff with private transport for travelling to and from work to avoid public transport and risk of exposure to SARS-CoV-2. Engineering changes included redesigning working areas to cater for social distancing. The mitigating measures put in place by the two laboratory animal facilities were successful in ensuring the continued welfare of animals during the COVID-19 lockdown restrictions. These measures can be adopted in future pandemics that lead to restricted movement of staff.