02/13/2022
The First Evidence of Omicron Spilling Over Into Wild Animals Has Just Been Found
Vaughn Cooper sees white-tailed deer every day in his neighborhood outside Pittsburgh.
The species is common in most US states. Pennsylvania alone has around 1.5 million white-tailed deer – about 30 per square mile (2.6 square km) – while the US has around 30 million in total
"My dog goes ripping after the deer every morning," Cooper, the director of the Center for Evolutionary Biology and Medicine at the University of Pittsburgh, told Insider.
Interactions between humans and deer – or deer and other animals – are a pressing concern among scientists, since the coronavirus now appears widespread in the US white-tailed deer population.
Researchers at Pennsylvania State University identified nearly 20 white-tailed deer in Staten Island, New York, that were infected with the Omicron variant between December 2021 and January 2022.
Their findings, which haven't been peer reviewed, mark the first report of Omicron spilling over to wild animals. A spillover event occurs when a highly-infected population passes the virus to another species that hasn't encountered it (or that particular variant) before.
The US Department of Agriculture has detected coronavirus infections among white-tailed deer in 15 states, a USDA spokesperson told The New York Times on Monday.
