3 ms·
40% of white tailed deer in the US are seropositive for SARS-CoV-2: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-02110-8 https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-0
by lamontcg 5y ago
40% of white tailed deer in the US are seropositive for SARS-CoV-2:
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-02110-8 https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-02110-8
In the case of the mink cluster 5 there were confirmed cases of the mink-adapted SARS-CoV-2 genome in infected workers on the farms.
Without similar genotyping its impossible to say if there's other similar events happening with other species, but the SARS-CoV-2 virus infects enough other species to be considered promiscuous.
- graeme 5y agoI’d heard of the mink. That would be easy enough to control with herd isolation and culls. Deer are trickier, but as the article notes we don’t know the state of active transmission. On the basis of existing evidence I think it’s premature just to give up and say it’s impossible, without having tried.
- lamontcg 5y agoThe point isn't to fixate on the deer or the mink. The problem is multispecies and there's dozens of them at least. It is large enough to not be solvable. I'd love it if we'd just give up entirely world-wide on mink farming already, but eradicating wild species is a non-starter. And we will likely never even identify all the species out there which could be reservoirs. You'd need to fully survey African nations and we still can't figure out where Ebola is coming from. There's going to be many times more species of animals that can be infected and be reservoirs of this virus that we don't know about than we do know about. And all those species in Africa count every bit as much as the minks closer to home.