"If that's the case, it would essentially dash any hopes of eliminating or eradicating the virus in the U.S. — and therefore in the world — says veterinary virologist Suresh Kuchipudi at Penn State, who co-led the study."
When Denmark discovered that COVID19 was running wild in their mink farms, they culled millions of minks and banned the entire industry which was the third largest within the agricultural sector in the country.
It doesn't need to cull all the deer. Wolves would remove the disease for free with surgical precision. Targeting the ill and weak, is what they do all the time.
Or we could vaccinate the deer and let the natural selection act over the Qmamon crew, of course. Even the big birds are vaccinated (and Colbert is a genius).
There is no evidence yet the deer actually get sick. It's quite normal for a virus to be terribly pathogenic in one mammalian species, and able to infect a wide variety of others but without illness or only minor illness. For example, camelpox (related to smallpox) is horrible in camels and kills a quarter of camels infected. In humans and most other mammals it usually is limited to skin sores at the site of contact and goes away quickly. Similarly, monkeypox is highly contagious and usually fatal in its host monkeys, much less contagious and only infrequently fatal in humans, and downright hard to give to a cow or mouse and it won't make them ill. But they can catch it. All of the poxes exhibit that trait, with family- or genus-specific pathogenicity but broad cross-species contagiousness.
This is the reason to humans being unable to do this task, but wolves still are able to discover and target preys with the virus. Preys are proven in the hardest conditions possible. Even a small respiratory problem would eventually appear and be fatal if the prey must endure a long distance chase running from wolves.
Before we had people vaccines, we social isolated. It will be even more difficult to get deer to follow isolation and masking protocols and to show up to a vaccination clinic.
I think you severely underestimate how big the US is, how many deer there are, and how long this would take. Is it possible: yes. Will it take decades: likely.
I am not a veterinarian but there are things you can do, and that is being done (for swine flu for example), to prevent disease outbreaks in animals, also within wildlife. Primarily surveillance and control.
Swine flu is controlled within farms. Deer don't live in farms and if controlling/surveilling their population was possible, then other diseases such as lyme wouldn't be a thing.
I mean we have enough rednecks to get it done. Declare open season and even provide a bounty and it could be done shockingly quick. It's probably not a good idea though. I don't know, I'll yield to the science on this one.
The USA has many places without any roads at all, which require ~75 mile hikes to get to, like parts of Wyoming, and also shares a 2,5000 mile border with a neighboring country that is mostly uninhabited land. We do not have remotely enough resources to eradicate deer even if we were crazy enough to.
Not all hunters are rednecks. Also, clearly you have never gone hunting. Let's rephrase this in a more understandable way. Do you think it would be possible to kill/capture ALL the pigeons in even a single city
When Denmark discovered that COVID19 was running wild in their mink farms, they culled millions of minks and banned the entire industry which was the third largest within the agricultural sector in the country.