New study builds on data suggesting white-tailed deer could be a virus reservoir.
Just stop smooching deer.
No, they’re too adorable
There’s also a host of unknowns that researchers will try to address, including how exactly deer-to-human and human-to-deer transmission occurs.
I’m really curious about this, because although we have a lot of deer in the US, I don’t see them sharing air with humans very often. Coming into contact with the same surfaces? Sure. But I didn’t think COVID spread over surfaces very effectively.
Maybe hunters?
There was some good discussion of this on This Week in Virology. One of the weirder facts is that deer don’t seem to have dominant strains and (their equivalent) of OG, delta, omicron, etc. are all present in the population. Though these are all heavily modified so that they actually reproduce in deer.
This is one of the reasons that eradication for COVID was and is basically an impossible goal. You’d have to also clear it from all sorts of reservoir species.
Lol time to go deer hunting except instead of bullets it’s a tranq gun with Pfizer
They get THAT CLOSE to humans in the US?!
Camping in the Midwest, it’s not uncommon to wake up in the morning and have a few deer laying around the fire pit or munching on leaves at the edge of the campground.
Anyone who knows about being out in the woods, knows you shoo them away and never touch or approach them. They’re wild animals and can seriously injure you if they get spooked and choose to fight. But plenty of idiots will approach them and feed them apple slices and other natural snacks.
I’m convinced that Midwest white tail want to die. Black tail in Oregon take three days to cross a road.
In California, I’ll see them running across the street sometimes. There’s a lot of forests in my area and sometimes deer will wander out of them and into the neighborhoods
How are people getting that close to deer to transmit the virus?!
You’ve never tried huffing fresh deer-breath?
COVID is airborne. It can move through the air, remain in spaces for a long time, and generally transmit much easier through the air than most realize. People don’t need to be in real close proximity to the deer to get infected, just close enough to share some air. With lots of people, lots of deer, and lots of COVID, there’s lots of opportunities for cross infection.
I’m more curious how they know the deer infected the people. I’m assuming they really were special cases.
They compared the genetic sequences of the collected deer samples to available human ones and found 3 that were nearly identical, which suggests direct spread. From the article:
Lastly, the genetic data suggested three spillovers of deer-adapted SARS-CoV-2 viruses back to humans—two in North Carolina and one in Massachusetts. For this, the researchers compared the deer SARS-CoV-2 sequences to sequences of viruses isolated from humans, available via public databases. In all three possible spillover cases, SARS-CoV-2 isolates from human cases were over 99.9 percent identical to deer-adapted viruses collected from deer in the corresponding states.
