A white‐tailed deer population in Tennessee is unlikely a reservoir for SARS ‐ CoV ‐2, despite multiple exposures

Abstract A foundational challenge in disease ecology is understanding how pathogens invade and persist on spatiotemporally heterogeneous landscapes. For example, SARS‐CoV‐2 (SCV2) is a viral pathogen of importance to human health that can also infect wildlife. An important outstanding question is: Can wildlife species provide a long‐term reservoir for SCV2? Addressing this question requires, in part, a detailed understanding of how host movements and contacts contribute to transmission dynamics on real‐world landscapes. However, we lack a framework to scale up empirically observed individual movements and contacts to landscape‐level transmission. To address this gap, we developed a hierarchical model of contacts. We used our model to ask: How do the movements and demography of white‐tailed deer ( Odocoileus virginianus )—a wildlife species known to be infected with SCV2—affect its ability to act as a reservoir for SCV2? We performed three years of SCV2 surveillance on a focal white‐tailed deer population in west Tennessee and collared 75 deer to track fine‐scale movements and patterns of direct contact. Leveraging these movement data, we used our hierarchical model of contacts and recently developed theory to build movement‐informed epidemiological landscapes over which we could explore SCV2 persistence in silico. We found that the abundance of white‐tailed deer on our landscape was sufficient to maintain SCV2 given an assumption of randomly mixing individuals. However, site fidelity, limited dispersal, and seasonality in social interactions drastically reduced their ability to act as a reservoir across a wide range of realistic parameter space. Moreover, even when our model predicted that deer could potentially act as a reservoir, the seroprevalence needed for SCV2 persistence was always higher than what we observed, indicating white‐tailed deer were likely not maintaining SCV2 in our population. Our study highlights that the structure and seasonality of local transmission dynamics can be highly influential for the ability of a population to act as a reservoir. Thus broad, species‐level claims about reservoir status can often be misleading. Overall, our hierarchical model of contacts provides a conceptually rich approach to make movement‐informed predictions about how pathogens spread and persist on real‐world landscapes.