Coronavirus: US scientists suggest another animal link in tests on deer samples
- The discovery could ‘provide baseline information for surveyed populations prior to pathogen emergence’, say scientists
- The USDA says the results, which were tested in two different labs using different methods, ‘likely a false positive’
The researchers discovered three more positive samples dated in January 2020, when the virus was newly identified in China.
These samples were collected “very early in the pandemic” from wild deer populations in different parts of the US, said quantitative biologist Susan Shriner with the National Wildlife Research Centre in a paper posted on the preprint server bioRxiv.org on July 29.
The discovery could “provide baseline information for surveyed populations prior to pathogen emergence”, Shriner and her colleagues said.
The paper has not been peer-reviewed, and the findings were unexpected.
The main purpose of the study was to find out whether humans could pass the virus to wild animals. A large-scale survey conducted by the US Department of Agriculture earlier this year found that nearly half the white-tailed deer in the wild might have contracted the novel coronavirus. In some areas the infection rate reached 100 per cent.