A deer may have passed COVID-19 to a person, study suggests
The virus is widely circulating in white-tailed deer. Until now, no humans are known to have been infected by deer.
A white-tailed deer in Canada likely infected a human with coronavirus, according to new research. The case, reported in a preprint journal, would be the first known instance of a COVID-19 spillover from a white-tailed deer—a common species throughout North America—into another species.
Previous work has shown that the virus is circulating widely in U.S. white-tailed deer populations. Before this latest report, however, the virus appeared to be very similar to that found in nearby humans, suggesting that the deer likely were sickened by us—not the other way around.
Now, a team of 32 government and academic researchers in Canada has concluded in a new work posted in BioRxiv that in late 2021, more than a dozen
