Whether you are a nature lover, environmentalist, hunter, or all of the above, you no doubt heard the news in early 2021 that the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) found that as much as a third of tested white-tailed deer in Illinois, Michigan, New York, and Pennsylvania harbored COVID-19 antibodies.
Questions immediately ensued from the discovery: How did the deer get the virus? Could they transmit it to humans? And is their meat safe to eat?
As scientists investigated the COVID-19 variants harbored by the infected deer, more questions arose. While some strains resembled the Delta variant at the same time that Americans were experiencing Delta, other strains appeared to be the Alpha variant—which had long since waned in the United States. Why was it still active in deer? Were deer becoming U.S. COVID-19 reservoirs, keeping the virus alive?…