During the COVID-19 pandemic, high seroprevalence of the viral pathogen SARS-CoV-2 (SCV2) was reported in white-tailed deer (Odocoileus virginianus) populations in multiple locations across the USA. This has led to widespread concern that white-tailed deer could act as a “reservoir” for SCV2, enabling the long-term persistence and spillback of SCV2 into human populations. However, we lack an understanding of how white-tailed deer movements affect among-deer transmission of SCV2, hindering our ability to predict when populations might act as reservoirs. Focusing on a population in west Tennessee, we combined two years of movement data from 66 deer, landscape-level seroprevalence sampling of 173 deer, and epidemiological modeling to ask: Under what ecological and epidemiological conditions can white-tailed deer act as a reservoir host for SCV2? We detected at least two strains of SCV2 in our study population with seroprevalence ranging from 5%-10%, indicating multiple exposure events. Using our empirical movement data, we built an epidemiological model that accounted for empirically realistic, seasonally varying animal movements. We found that high site fidelity of animals and seasonally varying social interactions made it highly unlikely that SCV2 could persist in the deer population for three or more years. These results held even with high levels of young male dispersal and simulated densities of deer up to 52 per square mile. Thus, despite broad categorization of white-tailed deer as reservoir hosts for SCV2, spatial and social dynamics of west Tennessee deer make it very difficult for SCV2 to persist without repeated spillover events from some external source.
