It's necessary for the world to realize breeding livestock like we do now is unsustainable. Either we go vegan, lab meat or hybrid agriculture. But the current industry is the dead end.
Yes it's costlier than beef from the developing world raised on cut-down rainforest land, but growing lab is a lot more expensive.
You can argue that it's inefficient, sure, but so is a vegan eating an avacado instead of white rice. Things can be relatively inefficient and still be sustainable.
If you kill all the mammals, then the birds of prey will go extinct, and stuff the mammals eat will overrun what’s left.
If you don’t, then the mammals will keep spreading all sorts of pandemics.
For example, if you live in Silicon Valley, start feeding the squirrels in the woods near you. Eventually, they’ll give you the Bubonic Plague.
The plague is not a big deal these days, thanks to antibiotics, but this is an entire hemisphere away from where it hit, and hundreds of years later.
It wouldn’t surprise me if you could already catch covid from a squirrel if you tried hard enough.
Apparently people catch it from bats fairly regularly, and on average, they don’t get nearly as close to humans as an average rodent would.
Birds of prey eat a lot more than just mammals, e.g. fish, reptiles, other birds etc. So no, if there magically weren't any mammals tomorrow most species of birds of prey would survive.
Delightful news, a case of H1N2 (swine flu) was reported in Canada today... 2020 ain't done yet
I can’t remember if H1N2 is better or worse than it.
This is why we had a “bird flu” or “pig flu”, and so on.
Coronaviruses cross between mammals all the time, mutate, and create new strains. This is why there is no cold vaccine (and why the flu vaccine changes each year, and is usually only 60-80% effective).
So, to answer your questions: (1) It is not any more worrisome than the news we had back in March. (2) It certainly has already and will continue to mutate in other animals. Should we be concerned? I guess. I made peace with this inevitable outcome months ago.
I feel sorry for the minks. I hope they don’t start testing other types of mammals and then decide to pursue wholesale eradication of local ecosystems and livestock.
Doing that is clearly a non-starter (the food chain would collapse). However, it is necessary-but-not-sufficient to prevent new coronavirus strains from popping up.