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NEW YORK, (77WABC)-White-tailed deer on Staten Island have become the first wild animals with documented Omicron infections. The coronavirus has now been found in deer in 15 states.
Credit…Andrew Seng for The New York Times
The findings add to a growing body of evidence that white-tailed deer are easily infected by the virus. The results are likely to intensify concerns that deer, which are widely distributed across the United States and live near humans, could become a reservoir for the virus and a potential source of new variants.
Researchers have previously reported that the virus was widespread in deer in Iowa in late 2020 and parts of Ohio in early 2021.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture has confirmed infections in deer in 13 additional states — Arkansas, Illinois, Kansas, Maine, Massachusetts, Minnesota, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, Tennessee and Virginia — Lyndsay Cole, a spokesperson for the agency’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service, said on Thursday. Those animals were infected with earlier variants of the virus.
“The circulation of the virus in deer provides opportunities for it to adapt and evolve,” said Vivek Kapur, a veterinary microbiologist at Penn State University, who is part of the Staten Island research team. “And it’s likely to come back and haunt us in the future.”
The news that Omicron had breached white-tailed deer populations was not unexpected, experts said.
“It’s disappointing but it’s not surprising,” said Dr. Scott Weese, an infectious diseases veterinarian at the University of Guelph in Ontario.
“Omicron is quite ubiquitous,” said Dr. Samira Mubareka, a virologist at Sunnybrook Research Institute and the University of Toronto.
