A study has found antibodies to the coronavirus in white-tailed deers in four U.S. states, but it is not intended to know whether these wild animals are carriers of the virus, Ohio-based daily newspaper The Blade reported on Tuesday.
The study recently completed by the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Animal and Plant Health inspection services determined that blood serum samples from white-tailed deer from the wild herd in Michigan, Pennsylvania, New York, and Illinois contained antibodies to the coronavirus.
"The study that we did really just looked at whether deer had antibodies to SARS-COVID-2, and we were not looking at whether they currently have the virus or the prevalence of the virus," Dr. Tom Deliberto with the National Wildlife Research Center in Fort Collins, Colorado, was quoted as saying.
"We found simply that deer in the four states we looked at were exposed to the virus. That is all that we can say from the study," he said.
The study, he said, was designed to determine the exposure of deer to the coronavirus in their natural environment but was not intended to determine whether the deer were replicating and shedding the virus.
