SARS-CoV-2 Establishment and Spread in White-Tailed Deer in a Chronic Wasting Disease Management Area

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Abstract
White-tailed deer (Odocoileus virginianus; WTD) are an abundant species in the United States of America (U.S.) that live closely with humans and carry zoonotic pathogens. In 2020, severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) spilled over from humans into WTD and spread throughout the population. In many areas of the U.S., chronic wasting disease (CWD), a slow-progressing and fatal prion disease, is endemic in WTD populations. WTD infected with CWD may have altered behavior or physiological conditions that pre-dispose them to infection with other pathogens. This study aimed to examine the co-occurrence patterns of CWD and SARS-CoV-2. Individual WTD were tested for both SARS-CoV-2 and CWD during two fall/winter seasons (2021–2022 and 2022–2023) across the CWD-endemic area of Illinois. We investigated the co-occurrence of the two diseases in individuals and spatially at the scale of management ‘sections’ to identify potential predictive factors. We did not find evidence that SARS-CoV-2 was more likely to occur in individual WTD that also tested positive for CWD. However, management sections with CWD detections predicted a 481% increase in the probability of SARS-CoV-2 detection, suggesting that the presence of CWD increases the chance of SARS-CoV-2 detection in the same area. We found also that occurrence of SARS-CoV-2 at the section level was predicted by different environmental factors than CWD, suggesting that their non-random co-occurrence was not driven by the same underlying mechanisms.

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