Oh, Deer
We gave them COVID, they're giving it back, and making us rethink "closeness"
By now, you’ve probably all heard that we humans gave SARS-CoV-2 to white-tailed deer. They don’t tend to get as sick as we do (though admittedly, it’s really hard to tell if a deer has a terrible fever and sore throat and would like a Tylenol), but they certainly do get it. In huge numbers. Some scientists estimate about 33-40% of all deer in the US have been infected. Which is really impressive, considering deer don’t spend any time indoors. We do, and 60% of Americans have been infected (ok as of 2022, it’s more now, we just don’t care). We gave COVID to deer at least 109 times.
Deer are, perhaps unfortunately, very giving critters, because now they’ve given it back. In three COVID cases, genetic markers were more than 99.9% similar to deer COVID.
Is this scary? Well potentially yes. Deer are officially a reservoir for SARS-CoV-2, meaning the virus can hang out in them, replicate in them, mutate in them. The disease it gives back to people, while right now it’s not different enough for anyone tell unless they do very large genetic analyses, could end up very different. More transmissible, maybe more dangerous. It’s got all the same problems with giving COVID to pets, to mink, to farm animals. But it’s a lot harder to control, because of course, the vast majority of deer in this country aren’t on a farm at all.
But the other question I hear often is how did this happen? The answer shows just how close we are with animals, even when most of us would not consider us close at all.
Often when we think of diseases from deer we think of Lyme disease (which I’ve had. It sucks. Wear bug spray, check for ticks). The role of deer in Lyme is as big bags of blood for baby ticks to feast on, feeding up more and more ticks—more and more of which carry Lyme.
COVID though doesn’t need an intermediary. It just needs animals and people to be close.
What is it to be close to an animal? A bird landing on your hand? A dog licking your face? A cat head-butting you? A cow in a slaughterhouse? All of these are certainly close, close enough to exchange fluids (and the stuff in those fluids), which is very close indeed.
But we don’t need necessarily be that close to someone to get a smattering of spit. After all, consider the last time someone sneezed or coughed or spoke around you and you saw the spittle fly (we’ve all been there). You can be 3-4 feet away and know you just got hit. Particles, as we’ve all learned by now, can hang in the air. They get in the water. They stay there.
People and deer do sometimes live close enough to touch. Some people really do put out big old vats of deer corn, and wait for deer to eat from their hands (for more on this, please see my book on the subject. And please don’t feed the deer). Others hunt, and end up elbows deep in offal. A few farm deer, though it’s not the close and personal experience most non-farmers might expect.
Most of us don’t live close enough to deer to have a Disney-princess moment of them eating out of our hands. But we still live plenty close enough. We live in the same areas, the same watersheds. Our viruses end up in our wastewater—which deer end up drinking. They end up in our trash—which deer end up eating. They end up on our pets, potentially in their feces, which deer might get very close to as they graze.
It all just emphasizes how linked we are to our environments. Many people might not see deer every day. They might think of them as treats you see driving in the dawn, hiking, trail running. But we are so much closer, separated not in space, but in time. The deer drinking from that stream might be drinking our “cleaned” wastewater. The hostas you weed around may have been deer food hours earlier. The grass on which we picnic might be hosting deer hours or even minutes later. We, and deer, are coated across the same suburban landscape of gardens, new growth forests and clearings. Our tides just ebb and flow at different times.
We are so, so close to many animals we never see. Because they are out of sight, they remain out of mind. It takes things like COVID, spreading from us to them, to show just how close they are.
Where have you been?
I hope it’s reading about the sea otter that’s stealing people’s surfboards because she’s a goddess, an icon. She’s 841 and I love her. We are ALL 841, chomping on surfboards and shredding the waves. Swim free lil’ girl, I’m with you.
Maybe it’s about how crows and magpies are using anti-bird spikes to build nests and give us the finger? My biggest frustration with this study is that I didn’t hear about it early enough to write about it myself! Can’t keep a good bird down. And besides, they usually build nests out of sticks! These are just…really weird sticks!
Where have I been?
Writing my latest piece for The New York Times, on a study showing that silence has a “sound!” Psychologists and philosophers got together and showed that listeners get auditory illusions to silence in the same way we do to sounds. This shows that silence itself is a form of “sound,” to the mind, that it’s just as an important part of our lives as sound is. And yes, I used the Simon and Garfunkel lyrics. You’re welcome.
Make sure to listen to the lovely interview I got to have with Rebecca Heisman about her book Flight Paths! Find out how a hummingbird the size of your thumb can fly across the entire Gulf of Mexico, and why every time you see weather radar on TV, it’s been corrected for birds.