While most people are done with COVID-19, recent numbers suggest that COVID-19 is not going away with people. For that matter, so do deer in Ohio.
Deer have been found to be more susceptible to the coronavirus. If humans become infected, the consequences can range from hospitalization, long-term health effects, and even death, but whitetails show few, if any, symptoms.
Perhaps the most important thing for people to understand is that the deer we live with in our suburbs and the forests and fields we roam are reservoirs of pathogens. Thus, the human-to-deer transmission route provides a potential route for deer-to-human transmission.
Andrew Bowman, associate professor in the Ohio State University Department of Veterinary Preventive Medicine, said the nature of the pathway and the evolution of the rapidly mutating virus in deer remains to be determined.
“It keeps me up at night,” he said last week.
This concern was addressed by a team of OSU researchers who used nasal swabs to sample 1,522 wild deer in 83 of Ohio’s 88 counties between November 2021 and March 2022. emerged from the research results. Approximately 1 in 10 deer tested positive for the coronavirus, and 49 of 83 counties had at least one positive test result.
Counties where deer infected with the coronavirus have appeared include Franklin, Delaware, Union, Fairfield and Hocking. Rural counties with large deer populations, such as Athens, Morgan, Washington, Meigs, Ashland, and Richland, had significant rates of infected deer.
Additionally, diseases are rarely transferred from species to species. However, he found 30 cases in which the research team could have traced the deer infection to humans.
“There’s not a lot of contact with deer to see this many infections,” Bowman said.
The discovery raises some questions, he told The Ohio State News.
“They seem to move between humans and animals very easily,” said Bowman, co-senior author of the study published in the journal Nature Communications. “And there’s growing evidence that humans can be infected from deer, which isn’t all that surprising. It’s probably not a one-way pipeline.”
The mechanism by which the novel coronavirus, an airborne pathogen that does not survive long outside its host, can be transmitted from humans to deer with apparent ease remains unclear and will require further research, he said.
At least two other findings raise further concerns, especially given the transmissibility of the pathogen.
For one, the new coronavirus appears to mutate about three times faster in deer than in humans. This means deer could generate previously unknown coronavirus variants for which humans are unprepared.
The other sample is from a deer carrying an earlier variant of the coronavirus that has already been transmitted and is now fully present in the human population. Therefore, it is still possible that one or more of the earlier strains will re-emerge in humans even after vaccination and immunity to the infection wears off.
The persistence of deer mutants “creates an opportunity,” Bowman said.
However, he said what is certain only applies to deer sampled through March 2022. It’s possible that the original variant disappears within the deer over time and poses no threat to humans, but future sampling will be needed to find out.
Deer hunters have closer access to free-ranging deer than anyone else, especially during the butchering and slaughtering stage of the hunt. Face masks and rubber gloves provide some safety, but they should not be ignored by those at risk.
Deer infected with the new coronavirus look normal, so there is no need to be alarmed. Properly cooked meat does not pose any health risks.
