Large numbers of white-tailed deer in Ohio have been infected with the coronavirus, suggests a new study led by Ohio State University.
CLEVELAND, Ohio — A new study led by Ohio State University suggests that large numbers of Ohio white-tailed deer have been infected with the coronavirus, creating a pool in which the virus mutates three times faster than it does in humans.
Those coronavirus mutations, if able to jump to humans, could create COVID-19 variants that spread more easily or evade vaccines, said Andrew Bowman, associate professor of veterinary preventive medicine at the Ohio State University and co-senior author of the study.
“The evidence is growing that humans can get it from deer – which isn’t radically surprising. It’s probably not a one-way pipeline,” Bowman said. “That means eventually deer may become a reservoir for SARS-CoV-2 to be reintroduced into the human population in a different form.”
It isn’t known how the virus is transmitted from human to white-tailed deer, or visa versa. No major outbreaks of COVID-19 strains that originated in deer have affected humans, study researchers said.
For the study, published this week in the journal Nature Communications, Bowman and his team collected more than 1,500 nasal swabs from deer killed by hunters during the hunting season from late 2021 and March 2022.
Researchers, stationed in deer processing stations, collected swabs in 83 of Ohio’s 88 counties, including Cuyahoga and some surrounding counties.
More than 10% of the swabs tested positive for the coronavirus, and 59% of the counties in which testing took place had at least one positive case.
At least 30 of the infected deer contracted the illness from humans, the study found. Deer and human respiratory tracts have some similarities that allow both species to contract COVID-19, he said.
“We generally talk about interspecies transmission as a rare event,” Bowman said. “But this wasn’t a huge sampling, and we’re able to document 30 spillovers. It seems to be moving between people and animals quite easily.”
About 70% of free-ranging deer in Ohio have not been infected or exposed to the virus. “That’s a large body of animals that the virus could spread through rather uninhibited,” he said.
“Having that animal host in play creates things we need to watch out for,” he said. “If this trajectory continues for years and we have a virus that becomes deer-adapted, then does that become the pathway into other animal hosts, wildlife or domestic? We just don’t know.”
People at high risk for COVID-19 may want to refrain from field dressing deer after hunting until more is understood about viral transmission between species, he said.
Coronavirus previously found in small white-tailed sampling
The current study is a continuation of a 2021 study in which Bowman and other researchers detected coronavirus infections in white-tailed deer in nine Ohio locations.
Bowman and his team continued to monitor deer for coronavirus infections caused by more recent COVID-19 variants.
“We expanded across Ohio to see if this was a localized problem – and we find it in lots of places, so it’s not just a localized event,” Bowman said.
By collecting blood samples from deer, researchers also found antibodies indicating a previous exposure to coronavirus. They estimate that nearly 25% of deer in Ohio had been infected with COVID-19 at one time or another.
The OSU study suggests that if infected deer do begin to pass the virus to humans, vaccination will help people avoid severe cases of COVID-19. The study pointed to an analysis of COVID-19 in Siberian hamsters, which suggested that vaccinated hamsters did not get as sick from infection as unvaccinated animals.
Martha Nelson, staff scientist at the U.S. National Institutes of Health, was co-corresponding author for the study.
Julie Washington covers healthcare for cleveland.com. Read previous stories at this link.
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