Deer in the U.S. have the virus that causes COVID-19.
🦌⚠️🦌 Deer Pandemic?! 🦌⚠️🦌 Scientists recently learned that TONS of white-tailed deer in the United States have SARS-CoV-2.
For almost two years, Dear Pandemic has translated science, separated the facts from misinformation, and widely disseminated accessible information to educate and empower individuals to navigate health decisions during a global pandemic. We thank you for trusting us to be a part of that process for YOU.
And Those Nerdy Girls are here to stay - expanding on our mission to provide sane and scientific breakdowns of the complex health information. As we head toward Giving Tuesday (Nov 30th) and the end of the year, please consider including a donation to Dear Pandemic by Those Nerdy Girls in your plans. Your generosity helps keep the science communication flowing at this all-volunteer operation and is always greatly valued and appreciated.
ETA: Trigger warning: this post contains real bad news, and it also mentions deer hunting.
***************
More than a few curse words were spoken by infectious disease epidemiologists upon hearing this news. It is very important and very, very bad news for our hopes of reaching herd immunity. It’s also worrisome in terms of possible viral variants.
ETA: If you’re heading out for deer season, you should definitely get vaccinated and wear an N95 mask at all times while handling/near anyone handling carcasses.
In a recent scientific paper, researchers from Penn State University reported their findings that SARS-CoV-2 (the virus that causes COVID-19 in humans) has spread widely in the white-tailed deer population of the United States. During one sampling period in Iowa (during the winter 2020 surge), 80% of the deer they tested were infected. And the variants circulating in deer were the same as in people, strongly suggesting that cross-species infection events happen often.
We don’t want to be overly alarmist, but this is real bad news.
Having *no* host besides humans is one of the prerequisites for any virus to be a candidate for elimination. Smallpox: No wild animal host. Polio: no wild animal host. Hepatitis: no wild animal host. Measles: no wild animal host.
SARS-CoV-2: animal host.
Deer-to-deer transmission and widespread infection in the deer community means there is now a wild animal reservoir of the virus, and there is currently no way to immunize a wild animal population.
So, with a wild animal reservoir of the virus out there, even after the pandemic has faded into history we will still have periodic new outbreaks of COVID-19 whenever a human is infected by a wild deer.
*Herd immunity* (ahem) will be much harder or impossible to achieve due to a steady trickle of deer-human interactions constantly reintroducing new cases of COVID-19 into the human population. The disease will likely become endemic in the United States in the same regions where white-tailed deer are common–at least until a solution is found to the problem of immunizing wild animals.
But wait, there’s also *really* bad news.
Whenever a virus commonly crosses species there is a heightened risk of viral mutations–potentially significant mutations. And the deer are already widely infected, so there’s nothing to be done on the prevention front at this point. That ship has sailed. This makes closely tracking variants both more important and more challenging. The United States has done a very poor job of tracking variants to date. If a significantly-enough different variant arises, the vaccines we have already gotten will start to lose some of their punch (but probably not all of their punch, so that’s something).
Currently, most states do not test deer for SARS-CoV-2. The good news, we guess, is that deer with the disease don’t seem to be very sick.
Watch this story. Its implications for the future course of the pandemic are huge.
Goats and Soda sum it up well.
US not doing a great job tracking variants
Refresh yourself on some infectious disease vocabulary:
IN CASE YOU MISSED IT...
What are the side effects of COVID-19 vaccines in kids ages 5-11?
Are pets getting sick from COVID?
Like what you read? Please share it with others!
If you have a COVID question, let us know!
We read every question and use them to inform our upcoming content, though we are unable to respond to each specific question.