Aren’t there millions of other viruses circulating among animals all the time? Should we be that worried?
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Posts: 13890 | Location: The outer burrows | Registered: 27 April 2005
It's the jumping back and forth between animals and humans that becomes a problem. We don't want the virus to find a lot of hosts and to keep replicating and mutating.
We've been trying to get the virus controlled among humans via vaccination and other measures and it's been an uphill climb.
I think the thing that's worrisome is that the human version jumped to a wild animal and then immediately started circulating among the deer population. We have no way to deal with disease in that population. They won't wear masks and socially distance.
quote:
The fact that SARS-CoV-2 can infect animals is not new. The virus probably originated in an animal species and then jumped to humans, a process that scientists call spillover. Since the pandemic began, there have been documented cases of many animals getting the virus, with various degrees of illness.
Infections have turned up in cats, dogs, lions, tigers, pumas, ferrets, mink, certain rodents, snow leopards, and others. The CDC even has guidelines to protect pets from Covid-19. When a virus jumps from animals to humans and then back to animals, scientists call that spillback.
Most of these infections in animals appeared to be self-contained. An infected house cat presumably stays in the house when infected — it doesn’t start a chain of transmission. “They were all isolated cases,” Suresh Kuchipudi, a Penn State infectious disease researcher who collaborated with Kapur, says of known cases in animals.
The deer infections were different. “This is first time that a completely free-living animal species in the wild has been found to be infected, and that infection is widespread,” Kuchipudi says.
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Posts: 38221 | Location: Somewhere in the middle | Registered: 19 January 2010
White-tailed deer on Staten Island have tested positive for the virulent omicron COVID-19 variant, new research showed, adding to a growing body of research that shows widespread virus spillover from humans to deer populations.
A study that has not yet been peer-reviewed, published Monday in the preprint server bioxRiv, showed 19 of 131 deer sampled on Staten Island between Dec. 12, 2021 and Jan. 31, 2022, were positive for COVID-19 antibodies, indicating prior exposure to the coronavirus. The results mark the first time the variant has been discovered in wild animals.
We had an illness sweep through the horse barn here a month or so again - and also in barns in several other towns - super high fever and off feed - 8 or 9 horses at the barn caught it including mine, - one of my horse friends over near Bozeman lost her horse. My vet said they isolated a corona virus (not covid 19) when they swabbed and tested. It was scary. Worst part was several of the cases hadn’t actually been in contact with other horses - so they don’t know how it travelled. (Birds? Wildlife?)
I wonder how this is going to affect the large hunting culture in PA.
Somehow, I have a sickening feeling they will develop a conspiracy theory that the deer's illness was spread by elite Dems who are somehow out to get them. (But will they curtail hunting?)
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Posts: 14392 | Location: PA | Registered: 20 April 2005
Jodi
