Corona-zona

  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 Pe...

  One day after the post about deer getting COVID-19 , there's more news of cross-species transmission for us to worry about. There is a new type of coronavirus infecting humans, and it seems to be coming from dogs. It's a good story about medical detective work. Some health care workers in Haiti were not feeling well. Physicians thought they might have Zika virus, which circulates there. But tests turned up negative. So researchers exposed samples from the workers to a monkey cell culture, hoping if a virus were present it would infect the cells. It did, and genetic analysis of the cells showed the presence of a new kind of coronavirus, the eighth type known to infect humans. Turns out a nearly identical coronavirus was detected previously in Malaysia, where it had caused pneumonia in children. The fact that is popped up in both places so recently suggests it may have been circulating widely and scientists hadn't noticed it until now. Unlike deer, dogs do not avoid close ...

  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. ...