The Covid risk grazing in your backyard
One of the biggest potential barriers to neutralizing the coronavirus is the risk that it could spread back to animals, mutate into a more deadly and transmissible variant, and return to humans. Researchers say that white-tailed deer could be one such reservoir for the pathogen. The Department of Agriculture has already confirmed infections in deer in 14 states: Arkansas, Illinois, Iowa, Kansas, Maine, Massachusetts, Minnesota,
New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, and Virginia. Scientists at Penn State analyzed samples from more than 4,000 deer killed by hunters or hit by cars in Iowa and found 60 percent infected. “It’s completely mad,” lead researcher Vivek Kapur tells The New York Times. “It looks like it’s everywhere.” Worse, the outbreaks appear in clusters, implying that the virus jumped from humans to deer multiple times. Yet there’s no evidence any of the infected deer had serious illness or even significant symptoms. Recently, whitetailed deer on Staten Island in New York have been found carrying Omicron—the first time the variant has been discovered in wild animals. There are more than 30 million deer in the continental U.S., many living near humans, so if deer do become a reservoir, they will significantly raise the risk of infection for other wildlife, livestock, pets, and potentially people. For now, researchers still aren’t sure how humans are giving the virus to deer—let alone how the animals might spread it again to humans. Either way, says Kapur, “it’s likely to come back and haunt us.”