U.S. deer are catching COVID-19. What that means for our fight against the virus
Global News
Scientists have found evidence that some deer in the northern U.S. were infected with COVID-19, raising concerns that they could pass the virus back to humans.
Many white-tailed deer in the northern U.S. have caught COVID-19, some new studies suggest, with potential implications for the pandemic fight.
And while the same hasn’t yet been found in Canadian deer, scientists say that finding the virus in wild animals could spell the end for any hopes of completely eliminating COVID-19 in humans.
“Any disease that gets into multiple species, we can’t eradicate,” said Scott Weese, a veterinary infectious disease specialist with the Ontario Veterinary College and director of the Centre for Public Health and Zoonoses.
Two recent U.S. studies have found evidence that COVID-19 is in the deer population. In one study, researchers sampled 283 deer in Iowa from April 2020 to January 2021 and found that one-third of them had evidence of COVID-19 infection. The researchers said these infections likely resulted from multiple human-to-deer and deer-to-deer transmissions.
Another study by the U.S. Department of Agriculture found antibodies to the SARS-CoV-2 virus in 40 per cent of the 385 wild deer they sampled in 2021 from four states: New York, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Illinois. These antibodies suggest that the deer were exposed to COVID-19 at some point, the researchers wrote.
These scientists said they examined deer because they knew that the animals were biologically susceptible to infection by this kind of virus and can exhibit prolonged virus shedding, are social animals and often live near urban centres.
Canadian scientists have been watching the American research with interest, said Jeff Bowman, a wildlife research scientist with Ontario’s Ministry of Northern Development, Mines, Natural Resources and Forestry.
They’ve been looking for the possibility that wildlife species, including deer, could become a “reservoir” for SARS-CoV-2, he said.
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