COVID-19 pandemic

I didn’t see a topic open where this would fit well, so here 'tis (caveat to any hunters!):

 


(Maybe leave this thread open as kind of a bulletin board for COVID-related miscellany and start new threads branching from it as appropriate?)

There was no realistic hope of eliminating SARS-CoV-2 in the US even without the deer, but they do make things more difficult. One question is how the deer are initially exposed – they tend not to spend a lot of time with humans, especially indoors.

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I remember reading a few stories about dogs getting COVID… in rural areas where dogs are more likely to run free, it’s possible they’d have contact with deer.

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And they will be a perpetual source for new variants. :neutral_face:

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Yes, not a good thing. Perhaps a vaccine targeting parts of viral proteins that don’t evolve much under natural immune pressure (or under cervine immune pressure?) would be a good thing, since occasional spillovers into humans won’t provide much selection pressure to change those targets.

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White-tailed deer already have the ticks that carry Lyme disease.

In my part of the world, deer are common and could easily be downwind of an infected human. The other morning we had 5 in my backyard.
Sometimes people mistakenly”rescue” baby fawns while the mothers have wandered nearby to feed. It is interesting that the virus could jump species so easily. Certainly makes it seem more likely to have jumped to humans in the first place. I wonder if that initial jump was of a less contagious variant which only came to attention when mutations occured making it more contagious.

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Yeah, that’s true, it could just as easily be regular human contact. We also have a lot of deer here and plenty of hunters, so depending on how transmission happens, I could see it jumping between a dead/dying deer and a hunter.

Two spotted hyenas at the Denver zoo have covid-19

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All of the hyenas here are COVID-free, I’m thankful to report.

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Agree. That ship has sailed. It will be like influenza

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Omaha:

 

(I don’t know about Lincoln or Omaha zoos, however.)

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I think some COVID 19 misinformation is needed here.

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Personally, I miss having respect for humanity. So maybe humanism took a big hit with Covid. Something good may come of it.

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My county is reportedly only about 40% vaccinated, and today’s hunting season opening–hm–maybe we’ll have a spike in post-cleaning Covid! Hunting is a big thing here, always used for food. Until recently, some schools closed on November 15th to allow the students to hunt.

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Same here, and I’ve been hearing gunshots regularly for the last two weeks. A fairly new development on the other side of the creek is called Deerfield Estates (some name inflation there).

ETA: (The firearms season just opened two days ago, Saturday, so shots heard before that were presumably target practice.)

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We have a firing range within (faint) earshot of our house, so we hear them all year. The neighbors’ dogs are a lot louder, though

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