[giantrobot]

Animal reservoirs are usually only meaningful if there's significant interaction with those animals and humans and a meaningful ability for the virus to spread between species. Most people don't snuggle up next to a white tailed deer every night so the chance of catching COVID from one is pretty low.

Even if clusters emerged from animal reservoirs, a vaccinated human population would help keep the r0 value below one and allow for containment. COVID had an r0 above one and little meaningful mitigations against its spread early on so it quickly got to epidemic and then pandemic levels.

[rory]

The claim being debated is eradication, so containment is a serious goalpost shift.

[giantrobot]

Eliminating a virus is eliminating community spread i.e. containment of infection clusters.

[rory]

That's not eradication. See "Definitions": https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/su48a7.htm