BirdGuides c33fff47-d674-4c57-ab94-b6012a68c340 Despite COVID-19 restrictions and the risk of animal to human disease transmission, illegal wildlife trade on social media networks has continued, with wild animals sometimes sold as 'lockdown pets'. Having analysed around 20,000 Facebook posts about wild pet trade in a new paper, entited Online trade in wildlife and the lack of response to COVID-19, researchers from Oxford Brookes University and the University of Western Australia are urging increased governance on social media sites in order to curb potential extinctions and reduce the risk of pandemics. The role of wild animals in emerging infectious diseases (EID) is very much in the spotlight presently. Human-animal transmission has been documented in previous virus outbreaks such as SARS and MERS. Several of the early cases of COVID-19 were linked to a wet market in Wuhan, China, although there is, as yet, not enough evidence to conclude how the virus transmitted to humans.