Referring to a new study The Guardian writes that a highly infectious variant of Coronavirus have been found in deer in Canada, where a human, who had reportedly had contact with the deer, was also infected with the same strain of the virus. “Scientists say at least one case of Covid-19 in humans can be traced to a strain of the virus found in hunted deer.”

Describing the Canadian study, the paper writes “Canadian scientists took samples from hundreds of white tail deer hunted last fall in southwestern Ontario. After conducting nasal swabs and testing the lymph nodes of the deer, they found 17 of the 298 deer were positive for a ‘new and highly divergent lineage‘ of the coronavirus.”

According to the paper “the virus bears little resemblance to strains currently circulating in human populations. Instead, the closest genetic relative to the strain came from samples taken from humans and mink in Michigan two years ago.”

It’s reassuring that we found no evidence of further transmission, during a time when we were doing a lot of sampling and a lot of sequencing. If we continue to do this surveillance, we’ll get a much better sense of what the actual risk is.

– Samira Mubareka, a microbiologist and clinical scientist at Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre (source: The Guardian)

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According to the CNN, the researchers speculate the new strain was probably “spilled over from humans to deer and then back to at least one human”.

“The new branch of the SARS-CoV-2 family tree has about 79 gene changes that set it apart from the original strain of the virus that was first identified in Wuhan, China. About half of those changes — 37 — have been seen in animals, but 23 of them have never before been identified in deer.”

It’s actually a pretty significant study, I think, because we’re seeing potential evolution of the virus in an animal reservoir.

– J. Scott Weese, a professor at the University of Guelph in Canada (source: CNN Health)

Dr Weese, who specializes in the study of infections that jump between animals and people, and reviewed the study but was not involved in the research told CNN “It went somewhere and changed over the course of months to a year, and it looks like most likely that was within an animal. We just don’t know what species or where.”

Dr. Weese suggested that “We need to get beyond a human-centric approach. Individual means individual; it doesn’t mean people. […] Vaccines aren’t highly effective at preventing transmission. We would have to have an animal vaccine that’s better than a human vaccine, and the animal vaccines are an older technology, so that would be a pretty high bar to set.”