Deer are Catching COVID-19

 

Well here's some not-great news. COVID-19 is spreading in deer populations. 

Researchers have published a pre-print paper detailing circulation of the SARS-CoV-2 in wild and captive White Tailed Deer populations in Iowa. Between November 2020 and January 2021, 82.5% of the deer they tested had evidence of the virus.

Doing genetic analysis of the viruses detected, the researchers concluded that there have been multiple "zooanthroponotic spillover events." That means transmission from humans to deer.

Wait...what?!? You may have noticed that deer prefer to stay as far away from humans as they can. Deer also live outdoors. Outdoor human-to-human transmission is believed to be rare. Human-to-deer transmission has to be even rarer.

How the hell did humans get close enough to deer to give them COVID-19—multiple times? It just doesn't make a lot of sense. 

However it is happening, it is happening and that's bad. Deer could serve as an animal reservoir for the virus. The virus could mutate in the deer population and come back into the human populations when hunters dress deer they kill.  

The research was done in Iowa but according to the researchers there is no reason to doubt that the same thing is happening in other states.

Image by Corona-zona

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