THIRUVANANTHAPURAM: The coronavirus that caused the first big wave of Covid-19, widely assumed to have vanished, may still be circulating in animals, warns Suresh V Kuchipudi, professor and chair of the department of infectious diseases and microbiology at the University of Pittsburgh’s School of Public Health.
His team studied white-tailed deer in the US, where infection was found to be widespread. The original strain has circulated in deer for more than four years, the study found. It has changed significantly, he said, and can escape more than 70% of the antibody protection people have, while still infecting both humans and deer.
“We assumed the pandemic went away, but the virus might still be circulating,” Suresh said on the sidelines of VIROCON 2026 in Thiruvananthapuram on Thursday. Genomic surveillance of human cases has largely stopped, and the virus “might be evolving in ways that we have no idea because we are not monitoring it,” the Indian American virologist said.
The same concern applies to H5N1 bird flu, now found in birds and animals on every continent and in dairy cattle in America. Each time a bird virus passes through a mammal, he said, it moves a step closer to adapting to humans.
He stressed that the work is ongoing and that the aim is not to alarm the public. Suresh said the message is meant for policymakers and scientists.
On Nipah, Suresh said the answer to why outbreaks keep recurring in a northern pocket of Keralam, though infected fruit bats are found across districts, is the same: cases are picked up only when they reach hospitals, so they appear localised.
“Simply the bat being present with the virus doesn’t necessarily translate into an outbreak. Humans have to somehow get exposed,” he said. Unless policymakers study local conditions, he said, “you will never know why people from that place are constantly getting infected.”
