Covid Intelligence Test

Editor's note: Your intelligence is being tested with this Business Insider article. The journalists over at Business Insider must be bored shitless to write stories like this. Covid is like a business model (that is where the money flows: government scientists) where even you can become a successful journalist by linking almost any creature alive on earth imaginable to Covid. It would be best to study the "terrain theory of viruses" after reading this. 

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Source: Business Insider

Omicron-infected deer put scientists on high alert for spillover of new variants to humans

By Aria Bendix | February 9, 2022

A white-tailed deer in Pineland Park, Pennsylvania, on November 2, 2021. Ben Hasty/MediaNews Group/Reading Eagle/Getty Images

• Nearly 20 white-tailed deer in New York were infected with Omicron this winter, research suggests. 

• The virus seems widespread among US deer, raising concerns about the spillover of new variants.

• For now, scientists are hopeful that deer won't pass the coronavirus to humans.

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 — 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 a 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. In a study published last year, Penn State researchers identified the coronavirus in about one-third of white-tailed deer sampled in Iowa between September 2020 and January 2021. Another research group found the virus in one-third of sampled deer in Ohio from January to March 2021.

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