The list of reasons to dislike mosquitoes and ticks is a fairly long one, and one Saskatchewan residents are well familiar with. Among the reasons is they can spread certain diseases like malaria and West Nile virus. The good news is the list of ailments they can spread almost certainly does not include COVID-19.

Andrew Cameron, an associate professor of microbiology at the University of Regina, is an expert on the spread of viruses like COVID-19. He said that while he's not prepared to fully rule anything out, you're not likely to get COVID-19 from a mosquito bite.

"I won't say it's impossible," he said. "As a scientist, we have to be alert to these possibilities, but there is absolutely no evidence to suggest that it is possible and it doesn't fit with our understanding of the coronavirus which causes COVID-19 with how it spreads and transmits between humans."

According to Cameron, the way COVID-19 spreads and the way pests like ticks and mosquitoes spread disease aren't really compatible. For an illness like the novel coronavirus, which attacks the respiratory system, transmission through blood is difficult if not impossible.

"As a respiratory infection, the virus is specifically evolved to spread between human respiratory tracts," he said. "So when a person coughs or exhales, those little droplets will contain viral particles. Those viral particles need to land in another human, ideally, for it to transmit. So a person will breathe it in, so it will interact with their lung tissues and start the next infection."

Cameron said the virus becomes extremely unstable once outside of the human body. It will degrade if not transmitted within a few hours. For mosquito bites, however, they take from the bloodstream when they bite, not the respiratory system.

"Insects are not like dirty needles or blood transfusions," Cameron said. "Instead, when an insect, like a mosquito or a tick bites and draws blood, it is actually sucking that blood in and that's going into the stomach of the insect, and the insect is digesting that blood. Most things that are in your blood will actually be digested by the insect. And we would fully expect that for the coronavirus that causes COVID-19 that it would not be able to survive inside that insect."

Diseases like malaria have evolved to survive inside insects, according to Cameron, but COVID-19 has not. In other words, the likelihood of COVID-19 getting into your blood is small, maybe even impossible, and a mosquito spreading that blood if it should bite you is also almost certainly impossible.

"Very little virus would be present in the blood for the insect to take up in the first place," Cameron explained. "And the insect actually digests the blood, and that would fully destroy the virus."

There is an extremely small likelihood the virus could replicate in blood cells, but Cameron said this would be a dead-end for the virus as it couldn't get into other respiratory systems. Though they are restricting blood donations for those suffering from COVID-19 until they know for absolute certain, the likelihood of transmission through blood is extremely small.

To make a long story short: if you get bitten by a mosquito or tick this summer, it's not likely to be an enjoyable experience, but it's also not going to give you COVID-19.