Deer season
In response to findings in the US, where SARS-CoV-2 appears to be widespread in both wild and farmed deer populations, Canadian health authorities decided to initiate screening of their own deer population. During the last two months of 2021, which overlapped with deer hunting season, samples were collected from nearly 300 deer killed by hunters; the unfortunate beasts were all screened for the presence of SARS-CoV-2.
The good news is that, in contrast to events south of the border, the presence of the virus appeared to be relatively low, with only 6 percent of the samples producing a positive test result.
Things got less reassuring when the researchers obtained genomes from some of these samples. All turned out to be distantly related to the rest of the SARS-CoV-2 family tree—roughly as distant from the common ancestor of the pandemic as the omicron variant is. The genomes' closest relatives turned out to be a lineage that had spread from humans to mink in Michigan. The lineage had been identified about a year earlier, but in the intervening time, the lineage had picked up 76 additional mutations—in fact, all the genomes had some small differences from each other.
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