Update: Is Bambi Getting COVID in Arizona?

 

Last fall, I blogged about a discovery that deer were getting COVID-19 and spreading it among each other. This story from Monday (HT u/AhavaKhatool on Reddit) says that Arizona officials are testing zoo animals and wildlife for COVID-19.  

[Aside: In the original post I wondered how deer could catch a virus from humans because deer are, y'know, not known for cuddling up to us. I've since read that they can get it from discarded food, or from captive deer that have closer contact with humans.]

That news article is very brief. It talks about the wide range of animals being tested and claims they have not yet found any cases. Unfortunately, it doesn't say how many animals are being tested or what the sampling strategy is.

I find it hard to believe they haven't found any yet and this makes me suspect they're not taking enough samples. Why? In this interview, scientists at Penn State said they were "gobsmacked" when 1200 of 2000 deer they tested in Pennsylvania, across multiple locations statewide, came up positive. 

This article claims scientists have found hundreds of infected deer in multiple locations in North America. The scientists in the interview say that once the virus gets loose in a deer population, it spreads like wildfire because of the deer's social behavior (I actually had to look up how to make "deer" plural possessive).

So far there have been no clear cases of the virus getting into deer or other wild animals, mutating, then re-infecting humans. But scientists say there is no reason why it couldn't happen. 

Awesome! That's all we need, the virus ping-ponging between species getting better and better at infecting. All part of the SARS-CoV-2 infinite repeat?

I'm glad Arizona is doing this. I wish we had more assurance that they are doing it right. Arizona state agencies don't exactly have the best record when it comes to pandemic science/mitigation.

Update (Meta-Update?) 5/21/22

This morning I was reading a WaPo article (paywalled) that indicated my statement about no cases of mutated virus migrating back to humans was incorrect:

To date, incidents of animals infecting humans are rare. Only three species — hamsters in Hong Kong, mink in the Netherlands and, possibly, also white-tailed deer in the United States and Canada — have transmitted a mutated, albeit mostly benign, version of the virus back to humans.

 


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