NEW YORK — The impacts of the coronavirus pandemic have been far-reaching, an encouraging reality further supported by the highly transmissible virus’s latest target: New York’s deer population.
New research compiled by a team at Cornell University School of Veterinary Medicine, published last month, found that the virus spreads rapidly through the state’s white-tailed deer. Most surprising, the researchers noted, was that the SARS-CoV-2 variants found in the animals were old and had not been circulating among humans for a few months.
The prevalence of past variants ravaging deer in dozens of counties across the Empire State raises new concerns about the mammals that serve as hosts for the viruses that collectively killed millions and sickened many more in the past two years.
More than 5,000 whitetail deer samples were collected during the hunting seasons (September through December) in 2020 and 2021 in an effort to take a snapshot of transmission trends. The 17 positive samples multiplied by 35 in a single year, amounting to 538 (21.1%) of all samples in 2021.
“The low positivity rate in Season 1 could be due to the fact that most of the samples in our study were collected before the peak of human SARS-CoV-2 cases in New York, which occurred between December 2020 and February 2021,” the researchers state. .
As of late 2021, deer have collectively tested positive for multiple variants outside of human circulation in at least 48 of the state’s 62 counties.
“In particular, while the Alpha and Gamma variants were circulating in [venados de cola blanca] in New York in November and December 2021, the detection of these [variantes preocupantes] in humans peaked between April and June 2021, with only sporadic detections after August,” the group explained.
“Although the pathways for transmission of SARS-CoV-2 from humans to WTD remain largely unknown, human activities such as feeding wildlife or baiting game prey (for example, WTD) could provide the opportunity for transmission from human to WTD of the virus.”
The researchers said the deer samples collected “were highly divergent” from virus sequences detected in humans since the virus burst in early 2020. Such a sequence change suggests a “rapid adaptation” of the COVID-19 virus, they said.
The mutation of the virus and its spread among deer became a major concern among the Cornell group, including its potential implications for humans in the future, which have yet to be seen.
Those behind the study say additional research is needed to examine the possibility of deer-to-human transmission and its likelihood of risk. To their knowledge, there has only been one reported case (in Canada) of a person testing positive for a white-tailed deer-like variant.
